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Giants of America
The Founding Fathers
[Illustration: James Madison]
JAMES MADISON
by
SYDNEY HOWARD GAY
[Illustration: _The Home of James Madison_]
ARLINGTON HOUSE _New Rochelle, N.Y._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE VIRGINIA MADISONS 1
II. THE YOUNG STATESMAN 15
III. IN CONGRESS 28
IV. IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY 45
V. IN THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE 61
VI. PUBLIC DISTURBANCES AND ANXIETIES 73
VII. THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION 84
VIII. "THE COMPROMISES" 94
IX. ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION 110
X. THE FIRST CONGRESS 122
XI. NATIONAL FINANCES--SLAVERY 144
XII. FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS 164
XIII. FRENCH POLITICS 185
XIV. HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS 207
XV. AT HOME--"RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99" 225
XVI. SECRETARY OF STATE 242
XVII. THE EMBARGO 254
XVIII. MADISON AS PRESIDENT 272
XIX. WAR WITH ENGLAND 290
XX. CONCLUSION 309
INDEX 325
ILLUSTRATIONS
JAMES MADISON _Frontispiece_
From the painting by Sully in the Corcoran Gallery of
Art, Washington, D. C.
Autograph from a MS. in the New York Public Library,
Lenox Building.
The vignette of "Montpelier," Madison's home at
Montpelier, Va., is from a photograph. Page
CHARLES COTESWORTH PINCKNEY _facing_ 98
From the original painting by Gilbert Stuart in the possession
of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, D. D., LL. D.,
Charleston, S. C.
Autograph from a MS. in the New York Public Library,
Lenox Building.
FISHER AMES _facing_ 162
From the miniature painted by John Trumbull in 1792,
now in the Art Gallery of Yale University.
Autograph from the Chamberlain Collection, Boston
Public Library.
DOLLY P. MADISON _facing_ 222
From a miniature in the possession of Dr. H. M. Cutts,
Brookline, Mass.
Autograph from a letter kindly loaned by Dr. Cutts.
BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE _facing_ 310
From the painting by W. H. Powell in the Capitol at
Washington.
JAMES MADISON
CHAPTER I
THE VIRGINIA MADISONS
James Madison was born on March 16, 1751, at Port Conway, Virginia; he
died at Montpellier, in that State, on June 28, 1836. Mr. John Quincy
Adams, recalling, perhaps, the death of his own father and of Jefferson
on the same Fourth of July, and that of Monroe on a subsequent
anniversary of that day, may possibly have seen a generous propriety in
finding some equally appropriate commemoration for the death of another
Virginian President. For it was quite possible that Virginia might think
him capable of an attempt to conceal, what to her mind would seem to be
an obvious intention of Providence: that all the children of the "Mother
of Presidents" should be no less distinguished in their deaths than in
their lives--that the "other dynasty," which John Randolph was wont to
talk about, should no longer pretend to an equality with them, not
merely in this world, but in the manner of going out of it. At any
rate, he notes the date of Madison's death, the twenty-eighth day of
June, as "the anniversary of the day on which the ratification of the
Convention of Virginia in 1788 had affixed the seal of James Madison as
the father of the Constitution of the United States, when his earthly
part sank without a struggle into the grave, and a spirit, bright as the
seraphim that surround the throne of Omnipotence, ascended to the bosom
of his God." There can be no doubt of the deep sincerity of this
tribute, whatever question there may be of its grammatical construction
and its rhetoric, and although the date is erroneous. The ratification
of the Constitution of the United States by the Virginia Convention was
on June 25, not on June 28. It is the misfortune of our time that we
have no living great men held in such universal veneration that their
dying on common days like common mortals seems quite impossible. Half a
century ago, however, the propriety of such providential arrangements
appears to have been recognized almost as one of the "institutions." It
was the newspaper gossip of that time that a "distinguished physician"
declared that he would have kept a fourth ex-President alive to die on a
Fourth of July, had the illustrious sick man been under his treatment.
The patient himself, had he been consulted, might, in that case,
possibly have declined to have a fatal illness prolonged a week to
gratify the public fondness for patriotic coincidence. But Mr. Adams's
appropriation of another anniversary answered all the purpose, for that
he made a mistake as to the date does not seem to have been discovered.
It was accidental that Port Conway was the birthplace of Madison. His
maternal grandfather, whose name was Conway, had a plantation at that
place, and young Mrs. Madison happened to be there on a visit to her
mother when her first child, James, was born. In the stately--not to say
stilted--biography of him by William C. Rives, the christened name of
this lady is given as Eleanor. Mr. Rives may have thought it not in
accordance with ancestral dignity that the mother of so distinguished a
son should have been burdened with so commonplace and homely a name as
Nelly. But we are afraid it is true that Nelly was her name. No other
biographer than Mr. Rives, that we know of, calls her Eleanor. Even
Madison himself permits "Nelly" to pass under his eyes and from his
hands as his mother's name.
In 1833-34 there was some correspondence between him and Lyman C.
Draper, the historian, which includes some notes upon the Madison
genealogy. These, the ex-President writes, were "made out by a member of
the family," and they may be considered, therefore, as having his
sanction. The first record is, that "James Madison was the son of James
Madison and Nelly Conway." On such authority Nelly, and not Eleanor,
must be accepted as the mother's name. This, of course, is to be
regretted from the Rives point of view; but perhaps the name had a less
familiar sound a century and a half ago; and no doubt it was chosen by
her parents without a thought that their daughter might go into history
as the mother of a President, or that any higher fortune could befall
her than to be the respectable head of a tobacco planter's family on the
banks of the Rappahannock.
This genealogical record further says that "his [Madison's] ancestors,
on both sides, were not among the most wealthy of the country, but in
independent and comfortable circumstances." If this comment was added at
the ex-President's own dictation, it was quite in accordance with his
unpretentious character.[1] One might venture to say as much of a
Northern or a Western farmer. But they did not farm in Virginia; they
planted. Mr. Rives says that the elder James was "a large landed
proprietor;" and he adds, "a large landed estate in Virginia ... was a
mimic commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its
regular administrative hierarchy." The "foreign relations" were the
shipping, once a year, a few hogsheads of tobacco to a London factor;
the "mimic commonwealths" were clusters of negro huts; and the
"administrative hierarchy" was the priest, who was more at home at the
tavern or a horse-race than in the discharge of his clerical duties.
As Mr. Madison had only to say of his immediate ancestors--which seems
to be all he knew about them--that they were in "independent and
comfortable circumstances," so he was, apparently, as little inclined to
talk about himself; even at that age when it is supposed that men who
have enjoyed celebrity find their own lives the most agreeable of
subjects. In answer to Dr. Draper's inquiries he wrote this modest
letter, now for the first time published:--
MONTPELLIER, _August 9, 1833_.
DEAR SIR,--Since your letter of the 3d of June came to hand, my
increasing age and continued maladies, with the many attentions due from
me, had caused a delay in acknowledging it, for which these
circumstances must be an apology, in your case, as I have been obliged
to make them in others.
You wish me to refer you to sources of printed information on my career
in life, and it would afford me pleasure to do so; but my recollection
on the subject is very defective. It occurs [to me] that there was a
biographical volume in an enlarged edition compiled by General or Judge
Rodgers of Pennsylvania, and which may perhaps have included my name,
among others. When or where it was published I cannot say. To this
reference I can only add generally the newspapers at the seat of
government and elsewhere during the electioneering periods, when I was
one of the objects under review. I need scarcely remark that a life,
which has been so much a public life, must of course be traced in the
public transactions in which it was involved, and that the most
important of them are to be found in documents already in print, or soon
to be so.
With friendly respects, JAMES MADISON.
LYMAN C. DRAPER, Lockport, N. Y.
The genealogical statement, it will be observed, does not go farther
back than Mr. Madison's great-grandfather, John. Mr. Rives supposes that
this John was the son of another John who, as "the pious researches of
kindred have ascertained," took out a patent for land about 1653 between
the North and York rivers on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. The same
writer further assumes that this John was descended from Captain Isaac
Madison, whose name appears "in a document in the State Paper Office at
London containing a list of the Colonists in 1623." From Sainsbury's
Calendar[2] we learn something more of this Captain Isaac than this mere
mention. Under date of January 24, 1623, there is this record: "Captain
Powell, gunner, of James City, is dead; Capt. Nuce (?), Capt. Maddison,
Lieut. Craddock's brother, and divers more of the chief men reported
dead." But either the report was not altogether true or there was
another Isaac Maddison, for the name appears among the signatures to a
letter dated about a month later--February 20--from the governor,
council, and Assembly of Virginia to the king. It is of record, also,
that four months later still, on June 4, "Capt. Isaac and Mary Maddison"
were before the governor and council as witnesses in the case of
Greville Pooley and Cicely Jordan, between whom there was a "supposed
contract of marriage," made "three or four days after her husband's
death." But the lively widow, it seems, afterward "contracted herself to
Will Ferrar before the governor and council, and disavowed the former
contract," and the case therefore became so complicated that the court
was "not able to decide so nice a difference." What Captain Isaac and
Mary Maddison knew about the matter the record does not tell us; but the
evidence is conclusive that if there was but one Isaac Maddison in
Virginia in 1623 he did not die in January of that year. Probably there
was but one, and he, as Rives assumes, was the Captain Madyson of whose
"achievement," as Rives calls it, there is a brief narrative in John
Smith's "General History of Virginia."
Besides the record in Sainsbury's Calendar of the rumor of the death of
this Isaac in Virginia, in January, 1623, his signature to a letter to
the king in February, and his appearance as a witness before the council
in the case of the widow Jordan, in June, it appears by Hotten's Lists
of colonists, taken from the Records in the English State Paper
Department, that Captain Isacke Maddeson and Mary Maddeson were living
in 1624 at West and Sherlow Hundred Island. The next year, at the same
place, he is on the list of dead; and there is given under the same date
"The muster of Mrs. Mary Maddison, widow, aged 30 years." Her family
consisted of "Katherin Layden, child, aged 7 years," and two servants.
Katherine, it may be assumed, was the daughter of the widow Mary and
Captain Isaac, and their only child. These "musters," it should be said,
appear always to have been made with great care, and there is therefore
hardly a possibility that a son, if there were one, was omitted in the
numeration of the widow's family, while the name and age of the little
girl, and the names and ages of the two servants, the date of their
arrival in Virginia, and the name of the ship that each came in, are all
carefully given. The conclusion is inevitable: Isaac Maddison left no
male descendants, and President Madison's earliest ancestor in Virginia,
if it was not his great-grandfather John, must be looked for somewhere
else.
Mr. Rives knew nothing of these Records. His first volume was published
before either Sainsbury's Calendar or Hotten's Lists; and the researches
on which he relied, "conducted by a distinguished member of the
Historical Society of Virginia" in the English State Paper Office, were,
so far as they related to the Madisons, incomplete and worthless. The
family was not, apparently, "coeval with the foundation of the Colony,"
and did not arrive "among the earliest of the emigrants in the New
World." That distinction cannot be claimed for James Madison, nor is
there any reason for supposing that he believed it could be. He seemed
quite content with the knowledge that so far back as his
great-grandfather his ancestors had been respectable people, "in
independent and comfortable circumstances."
Of his own generation there were seven children, of whom James was the
eldest, and alone became of any note, except that the rest were
reputable and contented people in their stations of life. A hundred
years ago the Arcadian Virginia, for which Governor Berkeley had
thanked God so devoutly,--when there was not a free school nor a press
in the province,--had passed away. The elder Madison resolved, so Mr.
Rives tells us, that his children should have advantages of education
which had not been within his own reach, and that they should all enjoy
them equally. James was sent to a school where he could at least begin
the studies which should fit him to enter college. Of the master of that
school we know nothing except that he was a Scotchman, of the name of
Donald Robertson, and that many years afterward, when his son was an
applicant for office to Madison, then secretary of state, the pupil
gratefully remembered his old master, and indorsed upon the application
that "the writer is son of Donald Robertson, the learned Teacher in King
and Queen County, Virginia."
The preparatory studies for college were finished at home under the
clergyman of the parish, the Rev. Thomas Martin, who was a member of Mr.
Madison's family, perhaps as a private tutor, perhaps as a boarder. It
is quite likely that it was by the advice of this gentleman--who was
from New Jersey--that the lad was sent to Princeton instead of to
William and Mary College in Virginia. At Princeton, at any rate, he
entered at the age of eighteen, in 1769; or, to borrow Mr. Rives's
eloquent statement of the fact, "the young Virginian, invested with the
_toga virilis_ of anticipated manhood, we now see launched on that
disciplinary career which is to form him for the future struggles of
life."
One of his biographers says that he shortened his collegiate term by
taking in one year the studies of the junior and senior years, but that
he remained another twelve-month at Princeton for the sake of acquiring
Hebrew. On his return home he undertook the instruction of his younger
brothers and sisters, while pursuing his own studies. Still another
biographer asserts that he began immediately to read law, but Rives
gives some evidence that he devoted himself to theology. This and his
giving himself to Hebrew for a year point to the ministry as his chosen
profession. But if we rightly interpret his own words, he had little
strength or spirit for a pursuit of any sort. His first "struggle of
life" was apparently with ill-health, and the career he looked forward
to was a speedy journey to another world. In a letter to a friend
(November, 1772) he writes: "I am too dull and infirm now to look out
for extraordinary things in this world, for I think my sensations for
many months have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life;
though it may be better with me after some time; but I hardly dare
expect it, and therefore have little spirit or elasticity to set about
anything that is difficult in acquiring, and useless in possessing after
one has exchanged time for eternity." In the same letter he assures his
friend that he approves of his choice of history and morals as the
subjects of his winter studies; but, he adds, "I doubt not but you
design to season them with a little divinity now and then, which, like
the philosopher's stone in the hands of a good man, will turn them and
every lawful acquirement into the nature of itself, and make them more
precious than fine gold."
The bent of his mind at this time seems to have been decidedly
religious. He was a diligent student of the Bible, and, Mr. Rives says,
"he explored the whole history and evidences of Christianity on every
side, through clouds of witnesses and champions for and against, from
the fathers and schoolmen down to the infidel philosophers of the
eighteenth century." So wide a range of theological study is remarkable
in a youth of only two or three and twenty years of age; but,
remembering that he was at this time living at home, it is even more
remarkable that in the house of an ordinary planter in Virginia a
hundred and twenty years ago could be found a library so rich in
theology as to admit of study so exhaustive. But in Virginia history
nothing is impossible.
His studies on this subject, however, whether wide or limited, bore good
fruit. Religious intolerance was at that time common in his immediate
neighborhood, and it aroused him to earnest and open opposition; nor did
that opposition cease till years afterward, when freedom of conscience
was established by law in Virginia, largely by his labors and influence.
Even in 1774, when all the colonies were girding themselves for the
coming revolutionary conflict, he turned aside from a discussion of the
momentous question of the hour, in a letter to his friend[3] in
Philadelphia, and exclaimed with unwonted heat:--
"But away with politics!... That diabolical, hell-conceived
principle of persecution rages among some; and, to their eternal
infamy, the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such
purposes. There are at this time in the adjacent country not less
than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing
their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox. I
have neither patience to hear, talk, or think of anything relative
to this matter; for I have squabbled and scolded, abused and
ridiculed so long about it to little purpose that I am without
common patience."
These are stronger terms than the mild-tempered Madison often indulged
in. But he felt strongly. Probably he, no more than many other wiser and
older men, understood what was to be the end of the political struggle
which was getting so earnest; but evidently in his mind it was religious
rather than civil liberty which was to be guarded. "If the Church of
England," he says in the same letter, "had been the established and
general religion in all the Northern colonies, as it has been among us
here, and uninterrupted harmony had prevailed throughout the continent,
it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been
gradually insinuated among us."
He congratulated his friend that they had not permitted the tea-ships to
break cargo in Philadelphia; and Boston, he hoped, would "conduct
matters with as much discretion as they seem to do with boldness." These
things were interesting and important; but "away with politics! Let me
address you as a student and philosopher, and not as a patriot." Shut
off from any contact with the stirring incidents of that year in the
towns of the coast, he lost something of the sense of proportion. To a
young student, solitary, ill in body, perhaps a trifle morbid in mind, a
little discontented that all the learning gained at Princeton could find
no better use than to save schooling for the six youngsters at home,--to
him it may have seemed that liberty was more seriously threatened by
that outrage, under his own eyes, of "five or six well-meaning men in
close jail for publishing their religious sentiments," than by any tax
which Parliament could contrive. Not that he overestimated the
importance of this wrong, but that he underestimated the importance of
that. He was not long, however, in getting the true perspective.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Dr. Draper has kindly put into our hands the correspondence
between himself and Mr. Madison, and we copy these genealogical notes in
full, with the letter in which they were sent, as all that the
ex-President had to say about his ancestry:--
MONTPELLIER, _February 1, 1834_.
DEAR SIR,--I have received your letter of December 31st, and inclose a
sketch on the subject of it, made out by a member of the family. With
friendly respects,
JAMES MADISON.
"James Madison was the son of James Madison and Nelly Conway. He was
born on the 5th of March, 1751 (O. S.), at Port Conway, on the
Rappahannock River, where she was at the time on a visit to her mother
residing there.
"His father was the son of Ambrose Madison and Frances Taylor. His
mother was the daughter of Francis Conway and Rebecca Catlett.
"His paternal grandfather was the son of John Madison and Isabella Minor
Todd. His paternal grandmother, the daughter of James Taylor and Martha
Thompson.
"His maternal grandfather was the son of Edwin Conway and Elizabeth
Thornton. His maternal grandmother, the daughter of John Catlett and
---- Gaines.
"His father was a planter, and dwelt on the estate now called
Montpellier, where he died February 27, 1801, in the 78th year of his
age. His mother died at the same place in 1829, February 11th, in the
98th year of her age.
"His grandfathers were also planters. It appears that his ancestors, on
both sides, were not among the most wealthy of the country, but in
independent and comfortable circumstances."]
[Footnote 2: _Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial Series, 1574-1660,
Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public Record
Office, edited by W. Noel Sainsbury, Esq., etc. London, 1860.]
[Footnote 3: The letters to a friend, from which we have quoted, were
written to William Bradford, Jr., of Philadelphia, afterward
attorney-general in Washington's administration. They are given in full
in _The Writings of James Madison_, vol. i.]