It would not be just, however, to leave the impression that the hostility shown in this affair was purely personal. Both Jefferson and Madison had a hearty hatred for Hamilton which would have been greatly gratified could they have made it the plain duty of the President to put him out of the Treasury Department a dishonored and ruined man. But this particular outbreak of their enmity was intensified by their sincere and earnest enthusiasm for France. They were quite willing to bring Hamilton to grief at any time because he was Hamilton; they were more than ordinarily exasperated against him just now because in recent newspaper and other controversies he had altogether got the better of them; but in this particular instance they wanted to punish him because of delay of payments in discharge of the indebtedness of the United States to France. This was the essential delinquency at which the Giles resolutions were pointed. The difficulty was, not that the secretary of the treasury was not careful enough of the public money, but that he was too careful. He insisted upon being quite certain, when paying off a public debt, that he was paying it to the right persons, and that no risk should be incurred of its being demanded a second time. He felt there was no such certainty about payments to France. The king was dethroned; but it was not wise, the secretary thought, to be hasty in recognizing revolutionary governments. It was a republic to-day; it might be a regency to-morrow; a monarchy again the third day. It was more prudent to await a reasonable period for the evidence of permanency on one side or the other. Those old enough to remember the late war of the rebellion know how important the maintenance of this doctrine was in regard to the recognition of the rebel confederacy by England and France.

But to all this Jefferson did not in the least agree; neither did Madison. They were in full, even passionate, sympathy with the men who brought Louis XVI. to the guillotine. Money, they knew, was needed, and it was a crime against liberty to delay payment when payment was due to the French government. With Hamilton the question was, not whether the revolutionists ought to be, but whether they were, France. With Jefferson and Madison they were France, because they ought to be. Hesitation to acknowledge that the Revolution was the nation, they thought, could only come from an "Anglican party," the "enemies of France and of Liberty," who would lead the American people "into the arms and ultimately into the government of Great Britain,"—to use the terms in which Madison spoke, a little later, of the Federalists. Which of these men, in this regard at least, were the thoughtful and prudent statesmen, and which were doctrinaires, nobody now, probably, questions. The larger proportion of the people, however, were then carried away by the enthusiasm for the French revolutionists. It was so, no doubt, at first without much distinction of party; but it was inevitable, when the government should be called upon to take some decisive stand in relation to European politics, that the country should divide into two hostile camps; or, rather, that the two camps already existing should become more hostile to each other than ever. It is not necessary to assume that the mass of the people gave themselves up to any very hard thinking about the matter. For the most part they followed, as the way is with parties, the political leaders to whom they were already accustomed, never doubting that not to do so would be treacherous to the gratitude America owed to France, and to the cause of liberty and democracy, which, in the hands of the Frenchmen, was hurling monarchs from their thrones—at least one monarch from his, and more, it was hoped, would follow. But when the revolution ran into the terrible excesses of a later stage, if any Federalists had wavered in their allegiance to their chiefs they soon returned, persuaded that the wild and bloody anarchy of Paris was not the road that led to the establishment of a wise and safe popular government.

There was no need now of pretexts for quarreling; real causes came fast enough. France declared war against England, and the United States had its part to play in this strife of giants. Its real interest was to keep out of trouble; and, if all were agreed on that point, it does not seem that there should have been much difficulty in saying so. "It behooves the government of this country," wrote Washington to Hamilton, "to use every means in its power to prevent the citizens thereof from embroiling us with either of those powers, by endeavoring to maintain a strict neutrality." It is difficult to conceive of a man being sincerely desirous of helping neither one side nor the other; of injuring neither one side nor the other; of maintaining, so far as help or harm could go, an attitude of absolute impartiality towards both,—it is difficult to conceive of such a man quarreling with the word "neutrality" as applied to his position. But Jefferson, nevertheless, quarreled with it; not frankly and directly as a thing he did not want, but captiously and hypercritically objecting to the word to cover his dislike to the thing itself. "A declaration of neutrality," he said, "was a declaration that there should be no war, to which the Executive was not competent."

It was true that the Executive was not competent to declare that there should be no war; it was not true that the use of the word "neutrality" could have any such application to the future as to prevent Congress, when it should assemble, from declaring war should it see fit to do so. But meanwhile, Congress not being in session, and no exigency having arisen that made it desirable in the President's judgment to call an extra session, he, with the assent of the cabinet,—for Jefferson did not venture upon direct opposition,—issued a proclamation "to exhort and warn the citizens of the United States carefully to avoid all acts and proceedings whatsoever" that might interfere with "the duty and interest of the United States" to "adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial towards the belligerent powers." The objectionable word was left out in deference to Mr. Jefferson, who, really preferring that there should be no proclamation at all, hoped to take the sting out of it by the omission of a phrase. It was the thing said, not the way of saying it, that the President insisted upon, as it was his duty to preserve the peace till the legislature should declare for war, and his inclination to preserve it altogether.

It can hardly be doubted that Jefferson and his friends saw as plainly as the other party saw how perilous to the interests of the United States a foreign war would probably be. But, while professing a desire to avoid it, they were far more anxious, apparently, to give aid, moral as well as material, to France, with whose revolutionary struggles they sympathized so deeply, than they were to avoid offense to England, whom they hated and would gladly see crippled. Not to be an enemy of England they held was to be an enemy of France; and not of France merely, but of the "rights of man." They could not or would not comprehend any wisdom in moderation, any prudence in delay. It is curious to see how party animosity blinded even the best of them. The objection to the word "neutrality" was a mere quibble; for the proclamation called upon all good citizens to maintain at their peril that state which, in all dictionaries, neutrality is defined to be. Mr. Jefferson, in instructing as secretary of state the American ministers abroad as to the attitude assumed by the government, could find no better term than "a fair neutrality." The fact was, the Republican leaders wished to avoid taking any positive stand, partly because delay might be a help to France, and partly in obedience to the law of party politics, in opposition to the other side. They were not at first quite sure of their ground, and wanted to gain time. Mr. Madison seems to have waited about six weeks before he could venture upon a positive opinion as to the proclamation. The newspapers helped him to a knowledge of party opinion, and party opinion helped him to make up his own. "Every 'Gazette' I see,"—he wrote in June, about eight weeks after the proclamation was published,—"every 'Gazette' I see (except that of the United States [Federalist]) exhibits a spirit of criticism on the Anglified complexion charged on the Executive politics.... The proclamation was, in truth, a most unfortunate error." A week before, he had been seemingly cautious even in writing to Jefferson. Then he had observed that newspaper criticisms aroused attention, and he had heard expressions of surprise "that the President should have declared the United States to be neutral in the unqualified terms used, when we were so notoriously and unequivocally under eventual engagements to defend the American possessions of France. I have heard it remarked, also, that the impartiality enjoined on the people was as little reconcilable with their moral obligations as the unconditional neutrality proclaimed by the government is with the express articles of the treaty." He adds: "I have been mortified that on these points I could offer no bona fide explanations that might be satisfactory." He was not in doubt long, however. Mr. Jefferson sent him within two or three weeks a series of papers by Hamilton, under the signature of "Pacificus," in defense of the proclamation, and urged him to reply. This Madison undertook to do at once, and in five papers, under the signature of "Helvidius," he took up all the points in dispute.

The question relating to treaty obligations was the more serious. By the treaty of 1778 the United States had guaranteed "to his Most Christian Majesty the present possessions of the Crown of France in America." An attempt on the part of Great Britain to take any of the French West India Islands would involve the United States in the war. How, then, Mr. Madison's friends might well ask, as in the letter just quoted he said they did, could "the President declare the United States to be neutral in the unqualified terms used, when we were so notoriously and unequivocally under eventual engagements to defend the American possessions of France"? Hamilton's ground was that the treaty, by its terms, was "a defensive alliance," and therefore not binding in this case, inasmuch as the present war against England was offensive; and that, besides, the treaty was in suspension, as France herself was, in a sense, in suspension, having only a provisional government, the permanent and legitimate successor to which was uncertain. But an important point was gained, it was thought, in the decision to receive Genet as the French minister. Hamilton, still acting in accordance with that cautious policy which he thought to be, in such a crisis, the most judicious, questioned whether a minister from the provisional government in Paris should be recognized without reservations. Such an ambassador might be followed presently by another accredited by a new power in the revolutionary progress. This would, at the least, be an awkward dilemma not to be recovered from without the loss of some dignity by the government of the United States. But this point also was yielded in deference to Jefferson, and much to his mortification the concession turned out to be before he was many weeks older.

"I anxiously wish," Madison wrote to Jefferson, "that the reception of Genet may testify what I believe to be the real affections of the people." He was amply gratified. From Charleston, where he landed, to Philadelphia, Genet was received with the warmest enthusiasm by all who sympathized with France, and by that larger number among Americans who are always ready to hurrah for anything or anybody that has caught the popular fancy. Madison watched his progress with great interest, and apparently with some misgivings. Writing again a few days later to Jefferson, he says that "the fiscal party in Alexandria was an overmatch for those who wished to testify the American sentiment." Indeed, he thinks it certain, he says in the same letter, "that Genet will be misled if he takes either the fashionable cant of the cities or the cold caution of the government for the sense of the public,"—falling himself, before he reaches the end of the sentence, into the cant of assuming neutrality in the government to be only a "mask" behind which to hide its "secret Anglomany." But he was quite mistaken in supposing that Genet was likely to be misled, or led at all, by anybody. He was almost capable, as General Knox said, of declaring the United States a department of France, and of levying troops here to reduce the Americans to obedience. The man's conduct, if it had not been so outrageous, would have been ludicrous in its assumption of power, its disregard of the laws of the country, and its defiance of the government. Within three months of his arrival Jefferson himself was constrained to acknowledge that he had developed "a character and conduct so unexpected and so extraordinary as to place us in the most distressing dilemma, between our regard for his nation, which is constant and sincere, and a regard for our laws, the authority of which must be maintained; for the peace of our country, which the executive magistrate is charged to preserve; for its honor, offended in the person of that magistrate; and for its character, grossly traduced in the conversations and letters of this gentleman." Though this was in an official letter, it gave, no doubt, Jefferson's real opinion; for no man had more reason than he for resenting the conduct of the irrepressible Frenchman. Jefferson has been accused of too much familiarity with the French minister in private, and of tardiness in the discharge of his own duty as secretary where it was likely to clash with the other's schemes. Genet himself complained that he was thrown over by Jefferson after receiving from him every encouragement. This is, of course, true, but not in the least discreditable to Jefferson. When Genet arrived in Philadelphia, he was, although he had already committed some illegal acts in Charleston, profuse in his promises of good behavior. The secretary of state had welcomed him as the representative of France and the Revolution, and naturally he meant to make the most he could out of him, for the sake of the Republican party, as well as for the sake of the sacred cause of "liberty, equality, and fraternity." But he soon saw that he was dealing with one who was a cross between a mountebank and a madman, as we learn from a letter of Madison to Jefferson, written within two months of Jefferson's first interview with Genet. "Your account of Genet," says the letter, "is dreadful. He must be brought right if possible. His folly will otherwise do mischief which no wisdom can repair."

The mischief dreaded was that the administration party would take advantage of the insolent and outrageous conduct of the French minister to show the folly of precipitancy, and to gain popularity and strength for itself. Madison soon writes to Jefferson to acquaint him with the reaction taking place in Virginia, "in the surprise and disgust of those who are attached to the French cause, and who viewed this minister as the instrument for cementing, instead of alienating, the two republics." He asserts that "the Anglican party is busy, as you may suppose, in making the worst of everything, and in turning the public feelings against France and thence in favor of England." In a sense this must have been true. The "fiscals," the "Anglomanys," the "Anglican party," the "monarchists,"—which were Mr. Madison's pet names for his old friends,—were good enough politicians to take great satisfaction in keeping well stirred and in lively use the muddy waters into which their opponents had floundered. They were not, probably, careful always to remember that France was neither the better nor worse, neither the wiser nor the less wise, because one of the mad fanatics, bred of the Revolution, had found his way, unfortunately, to the United States as a minister plenipotentiary. But, on the other hand, it was not true that there was any "Anglican party," in the sense in which Madison used the term,—a party led by men who were "the enemies of France and of liberty, at work to lead the well-meaning from their honorable connection with those [the French people] into the arms and ultimately into the government of Great Britain." Washington said that he did not believe there were ten men in the United States, whose opinions deserved any respect, who would change the form of government to a monarchy. But if there were only ten men in the country whose opinions, in the estimate of Jefferson and Madison, were not worth much, Washington was among them. The affection and reverence, with which he was regarded by the people, they would have been glad to appeal to on behalf of their own party; but it is easy to read between the lines in Jefferson's "Ana," and in his and Madison's correspondence, that they looked upon the President as the dupe of his secretary of the treasury. Not that they were ever wanting in terms of respect and even of veneration for the President, but the tone was often one of pitiful regret almost akin to contempt.

"I am extremely afraid," Madison wrote to Jefferson, "that the President may not be sufficiently aware of the snares that may be laid for his good intentions by men whose politics at bottom are very different from his own." Again he says, a few days later: "I regret extremely the position into which the President has been thrown. The unpopular cause of Anglomany is openly laying claim to him. His enemies, masking themselves under the popular cause of France, are playing off the most tremendous batteries on him.... It is mortifying to the real friends of the President that his fame and his influence should have anything to apprehend from the success of liberty in another country, since he owes his preeminence to the success of it in his own. If France triumphs, the ill-fated proclamation will be a millstone, which would sink any other character and will force a struggle even on his." Yet it is certain that Washington was not in the least doubt as to his own political principles; that he was never in danger of being inveigled into the betrayal of those principles, whatever they might be; and that he was quite capable of due care for his own reputation.

If Madison did not know that these tears over Washington, if sincere, were quite uncalled for, Jefferson was not in the least deceived. He records in his "Ana" that the President, referring to certain articles that had recently appeared in Freneau's "Gazette," said that "he considered those papers as attacking him [Washington] directly; for he must be a fool indeed to swallow the little sugar-plums here and there thrown out to him; that in condemning the administration of the government they condemned him, for if they thought there were measures pursued contrary to his sentiments, they must conceive him too careless to attend to them, or too stupid to understand them." Again, some months later, the President, alluding to another article in Freneau's paper,—that "rascal Freneau," as he called him,—said "that he despised all their attacks on him personally, but there never had been an act of the government—not meaning in the executive line only, but in any line—which that paper had not abused. He was evidently sore and warm," continues the candid secretary, "and I took his intention to be, that I should interpose in some way with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment of translating clerk in my office. But I will not do it."

These frank and indignant avowals of feeling and opinion were not, if we may believe Jefferson, unusual with Washington, even in cabinet meetings; and it seems hardly likely that Madison, who was on the most friendly and intimate terms with the President, could have been so ignorant of how he felt and thought as to suppose him the mere dupe of designing men. The truth is, probably, that Madison did not, any more than Jefferson, believe this. It was only a bit of party tactics to assume, lest the President should have too much influence over the minds of the people, that, in the hands of the wicked "Anglicists," he was as clay in the hands of the potter. The two friends, whether in writing or by speech they lamented and excused the unhappy position, as they were pleased to call it, of the President, must have appeared to each other like the Roman augurs in Gerome's picture.



CHAPTER XIV

HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS

Genet was at last got rid of, but the evil that he did lived after him. His presence had provoked an outbreak, to some degree, of the phenomena of the French Revolution, which, however significant they might be in the upheaval of an old monarchical despotism, were an unwholesome growth among a simple people, where one man was as good as another before the law; where, from the first settlement of the country, all had largely possessed the advantages of a popular government; and where any other than a republican government for the future was wellnigh impossible. For men to address each other as "citizen," as if the word had the new significance in America that it had just gained in France; to swear eternal fidelity to liberty, equality, and fraternity, as if these were lately discovered rights which had been denied the common people for centuries by kings and nobles, who had always lived in the next street in inconceivable luxury wrung from the blood and sweat of the poor; to form Jacobin clubs pledged to the suppression of the tyranny of aristocrats in a country where, as Samuel Dexter said of New England, there was hardly a man rich enough to own a carriage, and few so poor as not to own a horse; for men thus to ape those revolutionary ways, which meant so much in Paris, may have seemed at the moment, to sober-minded people, more fantastic than harmful. It was harmful, however, insomuch as it substituted sentiment for common sense, and made enthusiasm, not reason, the guide of conduct. A character was given to political conflict which obtained for years to come. There was, it is true, a certain manliness about it in remarkable contrast with that maudlin sentimentality of our time which is rather inclined to ask pardon of the rebels of the late civil war for having put them to the trouble of getting up a rebellion. It was a conflict, nevertheless, more of party passion than of principle, wherein it is impossible to see that either party was absolutely right, or either absolutely wrong. The Francomania phase of it disappeared for a time in John Adams's administration; but it revived again, and gave intensity and virulence to the political struggles, in the first decade of this century. Then it was that men went about their daily affairs with cockades on their hats as distinctive party badges. In their social as well as in their business relations they were governed by party affinities. Neighbors differing in politics would hardly speak to each other, and each was always ready to accept the other's political crookedness as the measure of his possible depravity in everything else. They would hardly walk on the same side of the street; or sail in the same packet; or ride in the same stage-coach; or buy their groceries at the same shop; or listen to the preaching of the gospel from the same pulpit; indeed, if the preacher was known to have pronounced political opinions, he was held, by those who did not agree with him, as one from whose shoulders the clerical gown should be torn.

Gratitude to France had not yet even become traditional, and it was intensified by the deepest sympathy for a people struggling for what, by their aid, Americans had so recently gained. Added to this was the old hatred to England, which England as carefully nursed as if it were her settled policy, by exciting Indian hostilities on the borders, by outrages on the high seas, and by an interference with American commerce, exercised with as little consideration of the rights of an independent nation as if the States were still colonies in revolt. Never did a party find, ready made and close at hand, so many elements of popularity; and these being appealed to as Genet appealed to them, it was easy to set the country in a blaze. When the administration was determined that he should be recalled, and the Republican leaders were anxious to get rid of him, as they could not restrain him, Jefferson opposed, in a meeting of the cabinet, the proposition to ask for his recall, lest such popular indignation should be aroused as would enable the French minister to defy the government itself. The seed sowed by such a man, on such a soil, bore fruit a thousand fold for almost a generation. It is not to be wondered at that the Federalists could not long hold their own against a party that did not ask the people to think, but bade them only to remember—much, indeed, that ought to be remembered—and to feel. That is always so much easier to do than the other, and it is always so much easier to appeal effectually to sentiment than to reflection, that the wonder rather is that the Federalists could hold their own so long as they did. All things were against them but one. Washington, though altogether above any partisan bias, as he believed to be the imperative duty of the chief magistrate of the nation, conducted his administration by the principles which distinguished the Federalists. He was neither, as he intimated to Jefferson, so careless as not to know what was done, nor such a fool as not to understand why it was done; and so greatly was he revered for his exalted character, so universal was the confidence in his integrity, sagacity, and sound judgment, that, so long as he remained President, the party that surrounded him was immovable as a mountain. His policy was to stave off a rupture with England, and, if possible, to bring that power into pacific and rational relations with the United States. The government aimed to keep itself clear of entanglement with all foreign politics; to maintain that perfect neutrality which should violate no treaties, offend no national friendships, provoke no jealousies, and leave England and France to fight their own battles, content that the United States should be an impartial spectator. Thirty years afterward, when the Federal party had ceased to exist under that title, this was announced as the true American policy, and was thenceforth known as "The Monroe Doctrine," though the merit, even of re-discovery, did not belong to President Monroe.

In nine cases out of ten, perhaps in ninety-nine out of a hundred, the wisest statesmanship is the knowledge when and how to compromise. Certainly that was all John Jay, whom the President sent to England to make a treaty, could do. The treaty was a bad one; that is, it was not such an one as any President and Senate would have dared to consent to for the last sixty years; it was not so good an one as that which Monroe and Pinkney negotiated ten years later, and which President Jefferson, lest it should help England and hurt France, then quietly locked up in his desk without permitting the Senate even to know of its existence; nor was it so bad as the treaty of peace made with England in 1814. But it was undoubtedly the best that could be done at the time. The question was between it and nothing; and the best its warmest defenders could say was that it was better than nothing. No treaty meant war; and war at that moment with England meant ruin. At least so the Federalists thought, and, so far as human foresight could go, they were probably right.

But never was a treaty more unpopular than this, when its provisions came to be understood. The government, in delaying to make it public, seemed to fear for its reception, and by that hesitation helped to raise the very doubts it was afraid of. But when it was published the whole South was aroused as one man on finding that the payment for fugitive slaves, who during the war of the Revolution had sought refuge with the British army, was not provided for. Other concessions made to England were, in other parts of the country, deemed not less humiliating and injurious to the national honor than this refusal to pay for runaway negroes. Also, there was a one-sided stipulation relating to commerce in the West Indies, so injurious to American interests that the President and Senate, rather than ratify it, determined to reject the whole treaty and take the consequences. There was hardly a town of any note that did not hold its indignation meeting. Jay was burned in effigy, or the attempt was made so to express the public disapprobation, in more than one of the larger towns. Hamilton, when at a public meeting in New York he tried to explain and defend the treaty, was stoned and compelled to retire. If the more violent opponents of the administration were to be believed, its members, from the President down, and all the leading men of the party supporting it, were bought by "British gold," or were ready without being bought, but from pure original depravity, to betray their own country and help to destroy France. The name of the ingenious inventor of the argument of "British gold," then used for the first time, has unfortunately been lost; but it has stood the test of a hundred years' usage, and is as startling and conclusive to-day as it was a century ago.

There soon came, however, the sober second thought which took into consideration the circumstances under which the treaty was made, the possible and even probable consequences of its rejection, as well as the objections to the treaty itself. After the first excitement had passed away, many thought it worth while to read for themselves what hitherto they had only reviled at the suggestion of others, or from sympathy with the popular clamor. The commercial community, the New York Chamber of Commerce leading the way, came to the conclusion that their rights and interests were reasonably protected; that to be recognized as a neutral between two such belligerent powers as England and France was a great point gained; that partial indemnity was better than total loss; and that the chance of a fairly profitable trade in the future was preferable to the ruin of all foreign commerce. It was universally agreed that peace was better than war; but there was this difference between the two parties: while one maintained that war was not a necessary consequence of the rejection of the treaty, the other declared it must be inevitable, where there were so many points of collision which could only be escaped by mutual agreement. This was especially true on the frontier, where Indian hostilities were sure to follow, and lead to general war, if the military posts, which should have been given up at the close of the Revolution, should remain longer in the hands of the English.

But, after all, the real question with the Republicans was the influence which a treaty with England might have upon the relations of France and the United States. They detested England for her own sake; they detested her still more for the sake of France. If there had been no question of France in the way they would, perhaps, have been willing, like the Federalists, to consider the relations of England and the United States on their merits,—to remember that the commerce between them was greater than that which the United States had with any other country, the loss of which might be a disastrous check to her prosperity; that the peoples of the two countries were, after all, of one blood, and that theirs was a common heritage in the institutions, laws, language, and character that distinguished the race; that the quarrel between them was—though it might be the more bitter on that account—a family quarrel, and ought for that reason to be the more speedily settled. But, if England would not remember these things,—as she never has to this day,—if, on the contrary, she chose to be overbearing, contemptuous, insolent, quite regardless of American rights,—as she always has been when she could be so safely,—then it behooved the United States, inasmuch as she was a young and as yet a feeble nation, to conciliate this powerful enemy whenever she could do so consistently with her self-respect, to avoid giving unnecessary offense or provoking fresh injuries, and, in the mean while, to nurture and husband her strength, to keep an accurate account of all the wrongs that in her weakness she should be compelled to submit to, and to bide her time. These were the principles of the Federalists. Their aim was, not the good of England, but the good of the United States. They were an American party; to them foreign relations were of importance mainly for the influence these might have upon the prosperity, happiness, and power of their own country. They did not forget the gratitude due to France for the aid she had given to the struggling colonies, though that aid was given not so much for love of America as for hatred of England. The pacific and friendly relations already established with France they held in due estimation; and their sympathies went out to her people in full measure in their struggle for a popular government, so long as that struggle was kept within the bounds of reason and humanity. But sympathy with and gratitude to France did not blind them to the wisdom and expediency of pacific and friendly relations with England, provided such could be established without the sacrifice of their own prosperity, independence, and national pride. It was only to add to that prosperity, to gain new security for that independence, and to build up a nation of which they and their children, to the latest generation, might well be proud, that they ought to be on good terms with that powerful state with whom they were co-heirs in all the ideas and institutions constituting the civilization that made her great. They hoped to build up, west of the Atlantic Ocean, "an Inglishe Nation" in its broadest sense, of which Walter Raleigh had hoped that he might live to see the beginning, and which the latest historical writers in England are just now recognizing as the most important part of the modern empire of the English race.

The House of Representatives was not in session when the Jay treaty was ratified by the President and Senate, but Mr. Madison's letters show that he could see in it nothing but evil. In February, 1796, the ratification by both governments was announced to both houses of Congress, and measures were at once taken by the Republicans in the lower house to render the treaty, if possible, null and void. A resolution, warmly supported by Mr. Madison, was offered, calling upon the President for copies of the instructions under which Mr. Jay acted, with the correspondence and any other papers, proper to be made public, relating to the negotiation. The resolution was subjected to a debate of three weeks, but was finally passed. The request was refused by the President, on the ground that the treaty-making power was, by the Constitution, confided to the President and Senate. It was on this point mainly that the debate had turned; and the President, in support of his opinion as well as that of the Federalists generally, referred to his recollection of the plain intention of the Constitutional Convention, and to the fact that a proposition, "that no treaty should be binding on the United States which was not ratified by law," was "explicitly rejected." Mr. Madison said a day or two after, that, while he did not doubt "the case to be as stated, he had no recollection of it." Of the message itself, he said that it was "as unexpected as its tone and tenor are improper and indelicate." But Hamilton, he thought, wrote it, and the President was, as usual, lamented over for having been taken in. A resolution, however, was finally passed in favor of the treaty, though by a majority of three only. The debate upon it was earnest and long, Mr. Madison leading the opposition. His disappointment was bitter. "The progress of this business throughout," he wrote to Jefferson, "has been to me the most worrying and vexatious that I ever encountered; and the more so, as the causes lay in the unsteadiness, the follies, the perverseness, and the defections among our friends, more than in the strength, or dexterity, or malice of our opponents."

Though the Jay treaty was not—as was said on a previous page—such an one as the United States would have acceded to in latter times, the result proved it to be a wise and timely measure. Notwithstanding the disturbed condition of affairs in Europe, its influence upon the United States, and the increasing violence of faction here, the increase for the next ten or twelve years of the commerce, and the consequent growth and prosperity, of the country were greater than the most sanguine supporters of the treaty had dared to hope for. Their immediate expectations that it might be possible to establish better relations with England, without disturbing essentially those existing with France, were, however, signally disappointed. Their opponents were wiser; for they not only measured accurately the indignation of the French by their own, but they took good care that it should not languish for want of encouragement. The French Directory might have been reconciled to the situation had it been plain to them that there was neither an "Anglicized" party nor a French party in the United States, but that the people were united in the determination to maintain, for their own protection, whatever their personal sympathies might be, an absolute neutrality between the belligerent powers. But as they were assured that their friends in America meant also to be their effectual allies, so they believed that those who professed neutrality used it only as a mask for friendship to England.

James Monroe had been received in Paris as American minister, literally as well as morally, with open arms, in that memorable scene when, in the presence and amid the cheers of the National Convention, the president, Merlin de Douai, imprinted upon his cheeks, in the name of France, the kiss of fraternity. Till he was recalled in the latter days of Washington's administration, Monroe was the representative not so much of the government to which he owed allegiance as of the faction to which he belonged at home. He was not, it is true, unmindful of the hundreds of outrages perpetrated by French naval vessels and privateers upon American merchantmen; that their crews were thrown into French prisons, and that the detention of their cargoes had brought ruin upon many American citizens; nor did he neglect to demand redress. But he seemed absolutely incapable of understanding that if there were anything to choose between the insults and wrongs which America was compelled to submit to from England and France, it was only in the greater ability of England to inflict them. English ships swept the ocean, and pretexts were never wanting for overhauling American vessels, stripping them of some of their men, or confiscating both ships and cargoes. France had as many pretexts, and quite as good a will to enforce them; but she had fewer ships, and for that reason, and that only, did rather less damage.

But however earnest Monroe was in insisting upon the rights of neutrals, in urging upon the French ministry the strict observance of treaty obligations, and in complaining of the constant injuries done in their despite, there was another thing about which he was far more earnest. He was as anxious to aid the French to baffle, if possible, Jay's negotiations in London as if he were uncovering a plot against his own government. When the ratification of the treaty was made known in Paris, the indignation of the Directory was hardly kept within bounds. The minister of foreign affairs notified Monroe that the Directory considered the stipulations of the treaty of 1778 as altered and suspended in their most essential parts by this treaty with England. Under any circumstances the French would, no doubt, have resented the establishment of friendly relations between the United States and the old enemy of France, with whom she at that moment was engaged in a war arousing more than the bitter inherited enmity of the two peoples. But the course Monroe had seen fit to pursue had done much to assure the French that the strong party in the United States, which he represented, would never permit the virgin republic to be delivered, as it was assumed the treaty did deliver her, bound and gagged, into the hands of the power which Jefferson loved to call "the harlot England." The first enthusiasm of the Revolution was fast growing into cant in both countries, and the language of devotion to liberty, equality, and fraternity was beginning to lose all meaning. But it was easy to be deceived by the assurances, more significant in actions than in words, of an official representative, that the American people, save an Anglicized and decreasing minority, were the friends, and meant to be the allies, of France. Of course the French were all the more exasperated because they had permitted themselves to be deluded. Monroe was first rebuked by his own government for neglecting to do all that might have been done to reconcile the Directory to a treaty between the United States and Great Britain; and soon after, his conduct continuing unsatisfactory, he was recalled.

It is, of course, possible that the French Directory were not misled; that nothing would have reconciled them to the British treaty; and that their subsequent course would have been the same had they believed the American people were desirous to be on good terms with England solely for their own tranquillity and interest, and not at all because any large portion of them were at enmity with France. This, however, would not be a valid excuse for Monroe's course as a representative of his government. The only defense for him is, that he was deceived by his friends at home; they must share, therefore, the responsibility for his conduct, inasmuch as they encouraged a man not over strong in mind or character, and more likely to be governed by impulse than by good judgment, to abuse the confidence placed in him by the administration.

From any share in this responsibility, however, Madison must be relieved. He was in very constant correspondence with Monroe, and kept him carefully advised as to the progress of the treaty. No man desired its defeat more earnestly than he, and he believed that a majority of the people were opposed to it. But he evidently doubted its rejection from the first, and his discussion of possibilities in his letters to Monroe was always frank and discriminating. In the end he accounted for the vote in its favor in the House of Representatives by the activity and influence of its friends, which its opponents wanted the ability or the time to overcome. It is probable that his colleagues of his own party in the House did not agree with him that public opinion was against the treaty, as it was by votes from their side that its acceptance was carried.



With the ensuing session of Congress, at the close of Washington's administration, Madison's congressional service ended. The leadership of the opposition, whatever may be thought of its influence upon the welfare of the country, or of the personal motives by which he may have been governed, had devolved upon him, almost from the beginning, by natural selection of the fittest for that position. It was not an easy place to take, either by one's own choice or by the suffrages of others; for at the head of the administration to be opposed stood the man most revered by a grateful country, surrounded by men among those, at least, who were best known for their past services and most esteemed for their ability and character. It was the more difficult for one whose personal relation to the President was that of the warmest friendship; to whom the President was accustomed to turn for counsel and even for guidance; and who, being among those eminent men to whom the people owed their new Constitution, was counted upon to strengthen the union of the States and build up a strong and stable government. He played his difficult part, nevertheless, with dignity; if not brilliant, he was always ready with the best reasons that could be given for the measures he supported; and his zeal was invariably tempered with a wise moderation and a courtesy toward opponents which made him always respected, and sometimes feared for reserved force, in debate.

Somewhat more than a year before his retirement from Congress Mr. Madison had married, and it is quite possible that this may in part have moved him to seek rest in the tranquillity of a country life. Tradition says that Mrs. Madison was a beautiful woman. She has in our time been a marked figure in the society of Washington, and many remember her for her fine presence, her powers of conversation, and that beauty which sometimes belongs to the aged, though it may not have been preceded by youthful comeliness. Her maiden name was Dolly Payne, and her parents were members of the Society of Friends. When Madison married her she was Mrs. Todd, the widow of John Todd, a lawyer of Philadelphia. Her age at this time was twenty-six years, Mr. Madison being forty-three, and she survived him thirteen years, dying in 1849. On her tombstone she is called "Dolley;" but Mr. Rives, in his life of her husband, ever mindful of the proprieties, calls her "Dorothea," or rather, Mrs. Dorothea Payne Madison; for, like the Vicar of Wakefield, he loved to give the whole name.



CHAPTER XV

AT HOME—"RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99"

Mr. Madison, in retiring for a time from public office, did not lose his interest in public affairs. Of few Americans can it be said with more truth that he had a genius for politics, and the subject, wherever he might be, was never out of his mind. There is not much else in the volumes of his published letters, while there is just enough else to show that in these he said all he had to say about anything. His more ambitious writings, the papers in "The Federalist," the essay on The British Doctrine of Neutral Trade, his controversial articles in the newspapers under various pseudonyms, are all political, all able, and all of great value as a part of the history of the times. Those which are controversial, however, must be taken, like his letters, as aids to knowledge rather than as definite conclusions to be accepted without question. It does not detract from the value of these letters, however, that they are written from the point of view of a party leader. Affairs of only temporary importance sometimes loom up before him merely because of their influence upon some immediate party movement; and others, of far-reaching consequences, which have no such bearing, escape his notice altogether; but the reader soon learns that he may, at any rate, confide in the sincerity of the writer, and accept as freely the reasons given for his course as they are frankly stated.

Of the literary value of his writings, aside from their historical interest, there is not much to be said, though Mr. Madison always wrote, even in his letters, as if writing for posterity. He was not felicitous in the use of language; the style is turgid, heavy with resounding words of many syllables, unillumined by any ray of imagination, any flash of wit or of humor; and the sentences are often involved and badly put together. But there is a genuineness, an evident sincerity of purpose, in all he wrote, and occasionally an expression of deep feeling, which are always impressive. We search for glimpses of his private life and character in such letters, for they are not easily apparent. In one sense he had no private life, or, at least, none that was not so subordinate to his public career that there was little in it either significant or attractive. There is, in this respect, a marked contrast between his correspondence and that of Jefferson. There was, possibly, a little affectation in Jefferson's frequent assertions of his intense desire for the quiet of the country and the tranquillity of home, and of his distaste for the turmoils and anxieties of public office. But he was certainly fond of country life, with the leisure to potter about among his sheep and his trees; to watch the growth of his wheat and his clover; to contrive new coulters for his plows; to talk of philosophy, of the Social Contract, of mechanics, and of natural history: if he was averse to public life, it was not because political power and distinction were a burden to him, except as they brought with them strife and unpopularity, which truly his soul loathed for himself, though he rather liked to set other people by the ears. His private life was unquestionably as full of interest to himself as it is entertaining to look upon in the unconscious revelation of his own letters.

But with Madison it was apparently quite otherwise. He unbent with difficulty. Always solemn and dignified, it was rather painful than pleasant to him to stoop to the petty matters of every-day existence. He had no small affectations, and was not forever asserting that he was without ambition; as if that, without which nobody is of much use in the world either to himself or to others, were a weakness akin to depravity. With brief intervals, covering only a few months altogether, he was where he best liked to be, from his entrance upon public life in 1775 till he stepped down in 1817 from that political elevation beyond which there are no ascending steps. During these forty-two years he found a certain enjoyment in a country home for a little while at a time, but it was chiefly the enjoyment of needed rest from official labor. The price of tobacco and the promise of the wheat crop interested him then, but only as they interested him always as a source of his own income, and as the index to the general prosperity. At the end of a letter upon political matters, he announces with satisfaction that his merino ewe has dropped a lamb, and both mother and offspring are as well as could be expected; but it was probably Mr. Jefferson's gratification rather than his own that he had in mind, for it was Mr. Jefferson who had imported the sheep. Again, in a similar letter, he takes a little remaining space to express a hope that Mr. Jefferson may permit the use of the rams of that flock to improve the breed of the native stock; not, apparently, that he cared so much about wool as that he wished to show a courteous and friendly interest in one of Mr. Jefferson's many projects for the improvement of things generally.

It was probably during the year of comparative leisure after he left Congress that Mr. Madison built his house at Montpellier, though some question has been raised on this point. He certainly was building a house at that time, and it is not likely that he ever employed himself in that way more than once. Scattered among discussions of Alien and Sedition Laws, the war in Europe, free goods in neutral ships, and other public topics, are brief allusions to lathing nails which he depended upon Mr. Jefferson to supply; that gentleman having recently set up a machine for their manufacture, which, however, like a good many other of his contrivances, seems to have had a hitch in it. So also he asks the Vice-President to see to it that, when the window-glass and the pulleys are forwarded, the "chord" for the latter shall not be forgotten; and orders for other articles, only to be found in Philadelphia, are sent to his obliging friend. Mr. Jefferson, it is easy to believe, found them rather the most interesting part of the political letters to which they were appended; and he was quite willing, no doubt, to relieve the tedium of presiding over the Senate by searching through the Market Street shops for the latest improvements in builders' hardware. To Mr. Monroe, Madison wrote that, as he is sending off a wagon to fetch nails for his carpenters, "it will receive the few articles which you have been so good as to offer from the superfluities of your stock, and which circumstances will permit me now to lay in." Evidently he was getting ready to go to housekeeping with his young wife. Monroe's stock of household goods had been replenished, perhaps by importations from France on his recent return, and he was disposing of his old supplies, by gift or sale, among his neighbors. Madison, at any rate, sends this modest list of what he would like to have: "To wit, two table-cloths for a dining-room of about eighteen feet; two, three, or four, as may be convenient, for a more limited scale; four dozen napkins, which will not in the least be objectionable for having been used; and two mattresses." It was not an extravagant outfit, even though it had not been meant for one of those lordly Virginia homes of which some modern historians give us such charming pictures. "We are so little acquainted,"—Mr. Madison continues in that stately way which nothing ever surprised him into forgetting,—"we are so little acquainted with the culinary utensils in detail that it is difficult to refer to such by name or description as would be within our wants."

But pots and kettles,—though that may not be the name they were known by in Virginia,—table-cloths and mattresses, however moderate in number, are sure indications that the house, which was to be his residence when he should be content to retire from public service, was finished early in 1798. He had rested long enough, and was busy that year in attendance upon the state Assembly at Richmond, to which he consented the next year to be returned as a member. Perhaps it was because he could not keep longer out of the fray. Perhaps he felt called to a special duty. Affairs, foreign and domestic, were in a critical condition. France, in her resentment at the Jay treaty, had committed so many fresh outrages upon American commerce; had so exasperated the American people by these outrages; and, by refusing to receive the ministers from the United States, had so insulted them and the government they represented in the proposed arrangements,—disclosed in the X. Y. Z. correspondence,—that all friendly relations between the two countries had ceased, and it had seemed impossible that war could be avoided.

For a while the popular sympathy was entirely with Mr. Adams's administration, and the promise could hardly be fairer that the Federalists, if they managed wisely, might remain in power and be sustained by the whole country. But in some respects they were as unwise as in others they were unfortunate. President Adams, though possessing many great qualities, was of too irascible and jealous a temper to be a successful leader or a good ruler. But there were other men of distinction among the Federalists who were hardly less fond of having their own way than the President was of having his. The incompatibility of temper was not altogether on one side in that family quarrel. But all were equally responsible for such a blunder as the enactment of the Alien and Sedition Laws. The provocation, it is true, was unquestionably great. Refugees from abroad had crowded to the United States, many of whom were professional agitators, and some were very sorry vagabonds. Whatever reason they might have had for fomenting discontent with government in England or in France, there was nothing to justify any such violent measures in this country. But from their conduct as political partisans, particularly as newspaper editors, they soon came to be looked upon by the Federalists—for they all joined the other party—as a dangerous class. There grew up a feeling that it would be wiser for civil affairs to remain, in city, state, and nation, in the hands of those who were born and educated under republican institutions, and not to fall altogether under control of those who were alien in blood and religion, and who were inclined to look upon politics, not in the light of the citizen's duty to the common weal, but as an easy and profitable calling where the least scrupulous scoundrel could gather the largest share of spoils. It may be that the authors of those laws were so determined to forestall the apprehended evils of such a dispensation because use had not accustomed them, as it has later generations of American citizens, to live under it in humility if not content. Or, perhaps, they wanted that profound faith of our time that the longer this subversion of government is submitted to, the easier it will be to get back to the rule of the honest and wise.

But, at any rate, whatever their reasons, they meant by these laws relating to aliens to put the acquirement of citizenship under more stringent regulations, and to check the growth and promulgation of seditious doctrines. If it be true, as is sometimes maintained with some plausibility, that citizens, to be intrusted with self-government, should be endowed with a certain degree of intelligence and virtue, then the aim of the framers of the laws, in the first case, was a good one; and, in the second case, the country has had some experience in later times which tends to show that they were not altogether wrong in believing that doctrines and practices which may lead to insurrection and civil war might best be met, so far as is possible, at the outset. Nevertheless, the laws, under the circumstances of the time, were ill-considered and injudicious. For one reason, they put an efficient weapon into the hands of the opposition at a moment when it was at a loss where to turn for one. "Anglicism" and "British gold" were blunderbusses which, in the present popular irritation against France, had for a time lost their usefulness, and were apt to miss fire. But an appeal to a generous and impulsive people on behalf of the unfortunate refugees, who had fled from the tyranny of the Old World to find liberty and a home in the New, was sure to be listened to. A good many, besides those who assumed that republicanism and the rights of man were in their special keeping, believed that an unfortunate class had been dealt with hastily, and even cruelly. The clamor, once begun, told heavily against the Federalists. They could be denounced now, not only as the enemies of liberty in France, but as refusing it to men of any nation or any race who should seek it in the United States,—it being, of course, understood that races of black or yellow complexion need not apply. It was, indeed, advanced as an argument against one of the acts,—which gave the President power to order out of the country all aliens whose presence he thought dangerous,—that it might be used to prevent the importation of persons from Africa. On this point Mr. Gallatin, a native of Switzerland, was exceedingly anxious lest there be a violation of the Constitution. But the outrage upon the rights of man here apprehended was the right of white men to make black men slaves.

Against the enactment of these laws Mr. Jefferson did nothing as Vice-President. But whatever was his motive for official inaction, it was not because he approved them. He wrote the Kentucky "resolutions of '98,"—the strongest protest that could be made against them, and to be thenceforth held by nullifiers and secessionists as their covenant of faith. But he acted secretly, taking counsel only with George Nicholas of Kentucky and William C. Nicholas of Virginia (brothers), and, Hildreth says, "probably with Madison." The resolutions were to be offered in the Kentucky legislature by George Nicholas, and, with some modifications, were passed by that body in November. A year afterward other resolutions were passed to reassert the opinions of the previous session, and to record against the laws the "solemn protest" of the legislature; and further declaring "that a nullification by those sovereignties [the States] of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instrument [the Constitution] is the rightful remedy." In the resolutions which Mr. Jefferson had prepared for Nicholas the year before, this essential doctrine is found in that portion which Nicholas had omitted, in these words,—"where powers are assumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy." As originally prepared, the resolutions were found in Jefferson's handwriting after his death. Hildreth's conjecture that Madison, as well as the brothers Nicholas, was consulted in the preparation of these resolutions, rests only on circumstantial evidence. The Kentucky resolutions were passed in November; those of Virginia in December; the former were written by Jefferson, the latter by Madison; and the doctrines in each are essentially the same. It would have been a perfectly natural thing for the two friends to consult together upon a measure of so much importance; there is no reason why they should not have done so; and these coincidences suggest that they probably did. Jefferson clearly shirked the responsibility of an act which he knew would endanger the Union; but Madison made no secret, so far as can be seen now, of his going to Richmond, though not a member of the Assembly, apparently for the express purpose of writing these resolutions and urging their adoption. But Jefferson was not a man of courage even in doing that which he believed to be wise. In Madison it was only the conscience that was timid; and having once convinced himself that the thing he proposed to do was right, he was always ready to face the consequences. It may be that neither of them foresaw that the real importance of this particular act was rather prospective than immediate; and if so, their conduct is to be measured by its instant purpose. If Jefferson meant then and there to dissolve the Union, or even to weaken the constitutional bond that held it together, he was not overcautious in keeping out of sight. But if Madison's intention was to strengthen the Union by withstanding what he believed to be a perilous violation of the Constitution, then his courage, though it is to be commended, is not to be wondered at. That, he said, was his motive, and to defend the resolutions and his own part in regard to them was the chief interest and serious labor of the latter years of his life. He was elected a member of the Assembly for the session of 1799-1800, probably because he and his friends thought his official presence desirable when the subject should again come up for consideration at the reading of the replies from other States, to all which the resolutions had been sent. The report on those replies was also written by him, and the position taken the year before was therein reaffirmed, explained, and elaborated at length.

In 1827-28 the doctrines of nullification and of secession were assumed to be the legitimate corollary of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 and 1799. Jefferson was dead; but Madison felt called upon to deny, in his own defense and the defense of the memory of his friend, that there was any similarity between them. From 1830 to 1836 his mind seems to have been chiefly occupied with this subject, upon which he wrote many letters, and a paper of thirty pages, entitled "On Nullification," which bears the date of 1835-36, the latter year being the last of his life. He resents the charge of any political inconsistency in the course of his long career, and most of all such an inconsistency as would impugn his attachment to the Constitution and the Union. The resolutions of 1798, he maintains, do not and were not meant to assert a right in any one State to arrest or annul an act of the general government, as that is a right that can only belong to them collectively. Nullification and Secession he denounces as "twin heresies," that "ought to be buried in the same grave." "A political system," he declares, "which does not contain an effective provision for a peaceable decision of all controversies arising within itself would be a government in name only." He asserts that "the essential difference between a free government and governments not free is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them, therefore, can have a greater right to break off from the bargain than the other or others have to hold them to it.... It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion." What,—he writes to another friend,—"what can be more preposterous than to say that the States, as united, are in no respect or degree a nation, which implies sovereignty, ... and on the other hand, and at the same time, to say that the States separately are completely nations and sovereigns?... The words of the Constitution are explicit, that the Constitution and laws of the United States shall be supreme over the Constitution and laws of the several States; supreme in their exposition and execution, as well as in their authority. Without a supremacy in these respects, it would be like a scabbard, in the hand of a soldier, without a sword in it." Abraham Lincoln might have said this twenty-eight years later when he determined that his first duty as President was to suppress insurrection.

Such is the drift of the many pages Mr. Madison wrote upon the subject during the last five or six years of his life. He looked then, whatever he may have thought in the closing years of the preceding century, upon the United States as a nation, and not as a confederacy having its parts held together only by "a treaty or league" called a constitution. But his object is to show that there is nothing inconsistent in the resolutions of 1798 with these opinions upon the sovereignty of the United States; that he held them just as strongly then as he held them now; and that they, and he as their author, looked to the States as a whole, not to a single State, to find and apply a remedy, in a constitutional way, for an unconstitutional measure of which an administration of the government might be guilty. His position is maintained with all the acuteness, ingenuity, and logical skill which mark his earlier writings. There is no sign of failure of mental power, of which those accused him who could not answer him. Such an imputation he resented with as much indignation as he did a charge of inconsistency, which here could only mean falsehood. There is no possibility, then, of misunderstanding his opinions during the last six years of his life; and the world has no right to doubt his repeated and earnest assurances that these were his opinions when he wrote the resolutions of 1798. It can only be said that the construction he gave them thirty years afterward is opposed to the universal understanding of them at the time they were written.

But if his defense of himself be considered complete, it is not even specious when presented on behalf of Jefferson. Mr. Madison wrote in 1830: "That the term 'nullification' in the Kentucky resolutions belongs to those of 1799, with which Mr. Jefferson had nothing to do.... The resolutions of 1798, drawn by him, contain neither that nor any equivalent term." It was not then generally known, whether Mr. Madison knew it or not, that one of the resolutions and part of another which Jefferson wrote to be offered in the Kentucky legislature in 1798 were omitted by Mr. Nicholas, and that therein was the assertion already quoted,—"where powers are assumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy." The next year, when additional resolutions were offered by Mr. Breckenridge, this idea, in similar though not in precisely the same language, was presented in the words, "that a nullification by those sovereignties [the States] of all unauthorized acts, done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy." In 1832, this fact, on the authority of Jefferson's grandson and executor, was made public; and, further, that another declaration of Mr. Jefferson's in the resolution not used was an exhortation to the co-States "that each will take measures of its own for providing that neither these acts nor any others of the general government, not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be exercised within their respective territories." All this must have been known to Mr. Madison then, if not before. Yet, three years later, in that paper "On Nullification" which has been mentioned, he wrote: "The amount of this modified right of nullification is, that a single State may arrest the operation of a law of the United States.... And this newfangled theory is attempted to be fathered on Mr. Jefferson, the apostle of republicanism." It would be charitable here to believe that there was some lapse of memory in these latter days, and that he had forgotten that Jefferson was, above all things, his own words being witness, the apostle of nullification.

The Alien and Sedition Laws—of which the more obnoxious of the former was never enforced, and the latter expired by limitation in two years—had their influence in the presidential election of 1800. But it was due more to differences between the President and some of the leaders of the Federal party that that party lost its hold upon power, never to be regained. With the election of Jefferson, Madison entered upon another sphere of duty, which was politically a promotion, but where his influence, if it was so large, was not so evident as when an active leader of his party. It was at Mr. Jefferson's "pressing desire," Mr. Madison himself says, in a letter written many years afterward, that he took the office of secretary of state. In the same letter he explains that he had declined an executive appointment under Washington, because, in taking a seat in the House of Representatives, he would be less exposed to the imputation of selfish views in the part he had taken in "the origin and adoption of the Constitution;" because there, if anywhere, he could be of service in sustaining it against its adversaries, especially as it was, "in its progress, encountering trials of a new sort in the formation of new parties attaching adverse constructions to it." The latter reason seems to be one of those happy after-thoughts which public men not unfrequently flatter themselves will anticipate a question they would prefer should not be asked. Mr. Madison was a member of the First Congress from the first day it met, before the new Constitution had encountered new trials from new parties by any constructions either one way or the other.



CHAPTER XVI

SECRETARY OF STATE

On the morning of March 4, 1801, Mr. Jefferson tied his horse to the fence and walked alone into the Capitol to take the oath of office as President. Mr. Madison was not present at that perfunctory ceremony, the death of his aged father detaining him at home. He soon after, however, assumed the duties of the station to which Mr. Jefferson had called him, and there he remained till he took the presidential office, in his turn, eight years afterward.

The new dynasty entered upon its course under happy circumstances. There was, of course, much to fear from the condition of affairs in Europe; for the United States must needs be in a perilous position so long as the struggle for supremacy continued between France and England, and that would be while Napoleon could command an army. But the danger of war with France was no longer imminent, since Mr. Adams had wisely reestablished friendly relations, though many of the leading Federalists believed it was at the cost of ruin to his own party. English aggressions upon American commerce had for the moment ceased, as fourteen years afterward they ceased altogether, when the provocation disappeared with the permanent establishment of peace in Europe. In the temporary lull of the tempest the sun shone out of a serene sky, and the land was blessed with quiet and prosperity. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none," the President said in his inaugural address, were among "the essential principles of our government, and consequently those which ought to shape its administration." The condition of the country was in accord with the thought and may even have suggested it. "We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists," said Jefferson in his inaugural: it was meant, however, as an avowal of a tolerant belief in the patriotism of both parties, rather than, as has sometimes been supposed, an assertion that party lines, so clearly drawn in the election, were at length obliterated. But hardly a year had passed before this seemed to be almost literally true. One after another, States hitherto Federal, both at the North and at the South, went over in their state elections to the Republican or Democratic party; till, with the exception of Delaware, there was not a single Federal State outside of New England; and even in that stronghold one State, Rhode Island, had marched off with the majority. "Everywhere," wrote Madison in October, "the progress of the public sentiment mocks the cavils and clamors of the malignant adversaries of the administration."

If it may not be asserted that this overthrow of the Federal rule was fortunate at that juncture,—as nothing is more idle in history than speculation upon what might have been,—it may at least be said that Jefferson's administration for his first four years was a happy one for his country and acceptable to his countrymen. None since Washington's has ever been so popular; and no other, except Lincoln's, has ever been so successful. Nor can it be said of it that it was a happy period because it is without a history; for it included acts of moment, accepted then with an approbation and enthusiasm which time has justified. Not less shallow is that view of his character and of those years of his administration, taken by many of his contemporaries, who neither loved nor respected him, and who attributed his success and his popularity to his good fortune. This was a favorite and easy way, among his political opponents, of explaining a disagreeable fact. Parton notes in his Life that C. C. Pinckney could only understand Jefferson's hold upon public confidence as "the infatuation of the people." John Quincy Adams said: "Fortune has taken a pleasure in making Jefferson's greatest weaknesses and follies issue more successfully than if he had been inspired with the profoundest wisdom." "When the people," said Gouverneur Morris, "have been long enough drunk, they will get sober; but while the frolic lasts, to reason with them is useless." There has been more than one occasion of late years, and in more than one place, where this may be truly said of popular political enthusiasm; but it was not true of that which prevailed for the first four years of this century; and Mr. Adams's sarcasm can hardly fail to recall the fact that when Mr. Jefferson, in his second term, was really guilty of a great folly in adhering to a prolonged embargo, it was Mr. Adams who committed one of the few follies of his own life in abandoning his party to give his support to the President's blunder.

Though there were many changes in Mr. Jefferson's cabinet in the course of eight years, they were not the result of dissensions. Yet he was, perhaps, more an absolute President than any other man who has ever held that position. He sought and listened to counsel, no doubt; but taking it was another matter. He certainly did not take it if it did not suit him; and if it was not likely to suit him, he was in no hurry to ask for it. It was in his own fertile brain, not in the suggestions of others, that important measures had their birth. That trait in his character which phrenologists have named secretiveness largely governed his actions. It was natural for him to bring things about quietly and skillfully by setting others to do what he wanted done, without himself being seen, though sometimes there was no other motive than the mere gratification of secretiveness. He preferred often to suggest measures quietly to congressmen rather than to Congress, though the result in either case might be the same. At other times, where the end to be attained was of great importance and he was absolutely sure only of himself, he boldly took the responsibility, as he did in the purchase of Louisiana, and in the suppression of the Monroe-Pinckney treaty with England in his second term. It is not surprising, therefore, that Madison's part, during the eight years of Jefferson's presidency, is found to be more a secondary one than is usual with a secretary of state, or than was usual with him. He was in perfect accord with his chief, who held always in the highest esteem his knowledge and judgment, and sought, no doubt, his sound and moderate advice when he thought he needed advice from anybody. But Madison's influence is less visible in Jefferson's administration than in Washington's, when he was in the opposition. Washington, where he doubted his own ability to decide a question and felt the need of enlightenment, was accustomed to call in Madison, though he did not always accept his friend's conclusions. It was rarely that Jefferson was troubled with any doubt of his own judgment in the discussion or decision of any question that might come before him.

The most important measure of his administration was peculiarly his own, and when once determined upon it was pushed to a conclusion with vigor and courage. Nobody doubts now, or has doubted since the abolition of slavery, that the purchase of Louisiana was an act of sound statesmanship. Jefferson did not foresee that the acquisition of that fertile territory would stimulate a domestic trade in slaves, as profitable to the slave-breeding as to the slave-consuming States; or that, as slavery increased and brought prosperity and power to a class, there would grow up an oligarchy, resting on ownership in negroes, which, within sixty years, would have to be uprooted at an enormous cost. But his aim was to secure the peaceful possession of the Mississippi territory on both its banks, as a permanent settlement of a question which, so long as it remained open, was a perpetual menace of war with one or another European power. That danger would always involve the possibility of the Appalachian range becoming the western boundary of the United States; in which case the valley of the Mississippi, and the vast region west of it, would fall into the power of an alien people. So far was plain to Mr. Jefferson; but the result of the rebellion of 1861 proves that he was wiser than he knew when he acquired the territory stretching to the Sabine and the foot of the Rocky Mountains for the occupation of a free people.

It is not necessary to repeat here the story of the purchase. The news of it reached Washington in July and was received with enthusiasm. That there was no warrant in the Constitution for an acquisition of territory by purchase was manifest; and Mr. Jefferson's opponents were not in the least backward in heaping reproaches and ridicule upon the great champion of strict construction, who had no hesitation in violating the Constitution when it seemed to him wise to do so. Both the President and his secretary frankly met the accusation by acknowledging its entire justice; but at the same time they put in, as a sufficient defense, the plea of the general welfare. This did not abate the ridicule, though the argument was a hard one for the Federalists to withstand; for it could not be forgotten that it was on this ground that Hamilton, as secretary of the treasury, had justified the imposition of certain taxes, and the Republicans had maintained that the plain limitations of the Constitution could not be overstepped on such a plea, even for the general good. Jefferson was so sensitive to this constitutional objection that he proposed to meet it by an amendment to the Constitution; but it was soon evident that the unwritten law of manifest destiny did not need the appeal to the ballot-box. "The grumblers," Jefferson wrote to a friend soon after the news of the treaty was received, "gave all the credit of the acquisition to the accident of war." "They would see," he added, in records on file, "that though we could not say when war would arise, yet we said with energy what would take place when it should arise." He only meant by this, probably, that from the beginning of his administration he had been prepared to take advantage of circumstances when war should break out again between England and France, as it was evident enough to the whole world that it must break out sooner or later. That the particular conjunction of circumstances, however, would occur that did occur, could not have been foreseen. Jefferson could have had no prescience that Spain would reconvey Louisiana to France; that Napoleon would enter at once upon extensive preparations for colonization on the banks of the Mississippi; and that he would be willing to relinquish this important step in his great scheme of a universal Latin Empire, that he might devote himself to the necessary preliminary work of subduing his most formidable enemy of the rival race. But it is Jefferson's best title to fame that he was ready to take advantage of this conjunction of incidents at exactly the right moment. Doubtless the progress of civilization would have been essentially the same had he never been born. But having been born it fell to him to contribute largely to the events that have distributed the race speaking the English tongue the most widely over the globe, and to exercise a powerful influence upon the age. It does not detract from the merit of his act, however, that he by no means saw all its importance, nor even dreamed of its consequences. The region beyond the Mississippi, he thought, might be made useful as a refuge for Indian tribes of the East; but he neither saw nor could see then that the purchase of Louisiana was the essential though only the preliminary step toward the occupation of the continent to the Pacific by the English race. The expedition of Lewis and Clarke, which he sent out the next year, was in the interest of science, and especially of geography, rather than of any possible settlement of that distant region. Indeed, he said that if the new acquisition of territory were wisely managed, so as to induce the eastern Indians to cross the great river, the result would be the "condensing, instead of scattering, our population." But "man proposes and God disposes."

The immediate consequences, however, of the acquisition of Louisiana were enough to bring almost universal popularity to the President, especially at the South and West, without any revelation of the future. Nor was the act the less popular because it was an immediate stimulus to the foreign slave trade, partly because at the North that excited but little interest, and partly because at the South it excited a great deal. The abolition societies, it is true, asked that the importation of slaves from Africa into the annexed territory should be forbidden; and an act was passed prohibiting their introduction, except by those persons from other parts of the United States who intended to be actual settlers, and were, therefore, permitted to bring slaves imported previous to 1798. But the law might properly have been entitled An Act for the Encouragement of the Trade in Negroes; and so it seems to have been regarded by the older slave States. South Carolina reopened the trade to Africa, and, as Congress failed to levy the constitutional tax of ten dollars a head, the raw material, so to speak, came in free. The rest could be safely left to the law of supply and demand. Neither South Carolina nor any other State had imported slaves since 1798. The whole slave population, therefore, could be legally taken into Louisiana by actual settlers, and its place supplied in the old States by new importations. The demand regulated the supply, and the supply came from Africa as truly as if the importation had been direct to New Orleans. This was the legal course of trade till 1808; thenceforward it flourished, without the protection of law but in spite of it, so long as it was profitable,—so long, that is, as the natural increase of the eastern negro was insufficient to answer the demand of the south-western market.

But, besides the peaceful extension of the national domain, there was much else in the first four or five years of Jefferson's administration to commend it to his countrymen. His party had nothing to complain of, despite that genial and generous assurance of the inaugural which could not be forgotten,—"we are all Republicans; we are all Federalists;" and the other party had reason to be thankful that, considering, as he said, "a Federalist seldom died, and never resigned," the number was not large who were reminded, by their removal from office, of their unreasonable delay in doing either the one thing or the other. It was only the politicians, however, a class much smaller then than it is now, who were concerned in such matters; the people at large were influenced by other considerations. Credit was given to the President for things that he did not do, as well as for things that he did. It was due to him that the administration was an economical one, but it was through Mr. Gallatin's skillful management of the finances that the old public debt was in process of speedy extinction. Occasional impeachments enlivened the proceedings of Congress, which otherwise were as harmless as they were dull. Jefferson was never so much out of his proper element as in war, yet a successful one was carried on, during his first term, with the Barbary States which put an end for many years to the exactions and outrages which had long been needlessly submitted to. It was a war, however, of only a few naval vessels in the hands of such energetic and brave men, destined to become famous in later years, as Bainbridge, Decatur, Preble, and Barron; and to send off the expedition was about all the government had to do with it. It was easy to keep clear of "entangling alliances," or entanglements of any sort with European powers, so long as they left the commerce of the United States to pursue its peaceful and profitable course without molestation. This both England and France did for several years, and there fell, in consequence, an immense carrying trade into the hands of American merchants, which brought prosperity to the whole country such as was never known before, and was not known again, after it was lost, for near a quarter of a century. All these things made Mr. Jefferson acceptable to the people as almost a heaven-appointed President. If, as John Quincy Adams thought, Fortune delighted to beam upon him with her sunniest smiles, he knew, at least, how best to take advantage of them. While they lasted, his secretary of state sat in their light and warmth, quietly and contentedly busy and in the diligent and faithful discharge of official duty, which could not in those years of prosperous tranquillity be over-burdensome.



CHAPTER XVII

THE EMBARGO

Almost at the beginning of his second term, Jefferson found himself in troubled waters, as the United States was drawn slowly but surely into the vortex of European war. The carrying trade at home and abroad had fallen very much into the hands of Americans, and this became the root of bitterness. The tonnage of their vessels employed in foreign trade and entered at the custom-houses of the United States was equal to nearly four fifths of the tonnage of British vessels engaged in the same traffic and entered at home. But there was this difference: the foreign commerce of Great Britain was almost all carried on from her own ports, and the returns, therefore, showed its full volume. On the other hand, the American ships were largely the carriers between the ports of the belligerents and of other powers in Europe, and there were no entries at the American custom-houses of their employment, or that they were employed at all. As early as 1804-5, the aggregate value of this foreign trade in the hands of Americans was probably much larger than that controlled by English merchants; and the former increased to the time of the promulgation of the Berlin decree of 1806, and the British orders in council of the next year. Nor was it only that wealth flowed into the country as the immediate return from this trade abroad. It stimulated enterprise and industry at home by the increase of capital; and there was not only more money to work with, but more to spend. Consequently the increase in exports and in imports grew steadily. In 1805, 1806, and 1807, about one half the average total exports, something over the value of twenty million dollars, went to Great Britain alone; and the value of the imports from that country for the same period was about sixty million dollars a year. Nor did this disproportion, though increasing with the growing prosperity, represent a general balance of trade against the United States, as one school of political economists would insist it must have done. For the imports were small from other European countries in exchange for American products; and the difference, together with the profits of the carrying trade abroad, was remitted in English manufactures. In other words, the imports from England represented the returns for all exports to Europe, and the returns also—available in the first instance through bills of exchange—of the trade which had been gained by Americans, and lost by those nations whose ships the war had driven from the ocean.

The British manufacturer had no reason for discontent with this state of things. The best market for his goods was constantly improving, and he did not much care who took them to America. But the English government, and the English merchants who owned ships, looked on with neither pleasure nor patience. It was impossible not to see that the United States was fast becoming a great commercial rival. This in itself was bad enough; but it was the harder to bear when it was remembered—and it could not be forgotten—that the rivalry came from States so lately in revolt against England, and that their President at that moment was one of the most obnoxious of the rebels. Then what did it avail that England was mistress of the seas, if her formidable enemy could laugh at any effort of hers to destroy the commerce of France, so long as that commerce could be carried on in safety under a neutral flag? If that flag must be respected, English naval vessels and privateers would cruise in vain for prizes, for the merchant ships of any belligerent, not strong enough to protect them, stayed in port. It had not yet come to be the acknowledged law of nations that free ships make free goods. But nearly the same purpose was answered if the property of belligerents could be safely carried in neutral ships under the pretense of being owned by neutrals. The products of the French colonies, for example, could be loaded on board of American vessels, taken to the United States and reshipped there for France as American property. England looked upon this as an evasion of the recognized public law that property of belligerents was good prize. Accordingly, when she saw that French commerce was thus put out of her reach, and that the rival she most dreaded was growing rich and powerful in the possession of it, she sought a remedy and was not long in finding one.

It was denied that neutrals could take advantage of a state of war to enter upon a trade which had not existed in time of peace; and American ships were seized on the high seas, taken into port, and condemned in the admiralty courts for carrying enemy's goods in such a trade. The exercise of that right, if it were one by the recognized law of nations, would be of great injury to American commerce, unless it could be successfully resisted. To show that it was not good law, Mr. Madison wrote his "Examination of the British Doctrine which Subjects to Capture a Neutral Trade not Open in the Time of Peace." The essay was a careful and thorough discussion of the whole question, and showed by citations from the most eminent writers on international law, by the terms of treaties, and by the conduct of nations in the past, that the British doctrine was erroneous and would lead to other infringements of the rights of neutrals. But argument, however unanswerable, has never yet brought the British government to reason, unless there was something behind it not so easy to disregard. The appropriation for Mr. Jefferson's gunboats could not get that naval arm ready for effective service much before the year 1815, even if it could then be of use; and there was, moreover, this further difficulty in the way of its efficiency at the time,—that, as it could not go to the enemy, it must wait for the enemy to come to it; the conflagration would have to be brought to the fire-engines. A war with England must be a naval war; and the United States not only had no navy of any consequence, but it was a part of Mr. Jefferson's policy, in contrast with the policy of the preceding administrations, that there should be none, except these gunboats kept on wheels and under cover in readiness to repel an invasion. But there was no fear of invasion, for by that England could gain nothing. "She is renewing," Madison wrote in the autumn of 1805, "her depredations on our commerce in the most ruinous shapes, and has kindled a more general indignation among our merchants than was ever before expressed."