THE YOUNG STATESMAN
Madison's place, both from temperament and from want of physical vigor,
was in the council, not in the field. One of his early biographers says
that he joined a military company, raised in his own county, in
preparation for war; but this, there can hardly be a doubt, is an error.
He speaks with enthusiasm of the "high-spirited" volunteers, who came
forward to defend "the honor and safety of their country;" but there is
no intimation that he chose for himself that way of showing his
patriotism. But of the Committee of Safety, appointed in his county in
1774, he was made a member,--perhaps the youngest, for he was then only
twenty-three years old.
Eighteen months afterward he was elected a delegate to the Virginia
Convention of 1776, and this he calls "my first entrance into public
life." It gave him also an opportunity for some distinction, which,
whatever may have been his earlier plans, opened public life to him as a
career. The first work of the convention was to consider and adopt a
series of resolutions instructing the Virginian delegates in the
Continental Congress, then in session at Philadelphia, to urge an
immediate declaration of independence. The next matter was to frame a
Bill of Rights and a Constitution of government for the province.
Madison was made a member of the committee to which this latter subject
was referred. One question necessarily came up for consideration which
had for him a peculiar interest, and in any discussion of which he, no
doubt, felt quite at ease. This was concerning religious freedom. An
article in the proposed Declaration of Rights provided that "all men
should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion,
according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by
the magistrate, unless, under color of religion, any man disturb the
peace, happiness, or safety of society." It does not appear that Mr.
Madison offered any objection to the article in the committee; but when
the report was made to the convention he moved an amendment. He pointed
out the distinction between the recognition of an absolute right and the
toleration of its exercise; for toleration implies the power of
jurisdiction. He proposed, therefore, instead of providing that "all men
should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion," to
declare that "all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise
of it according to the dictates of conscience;" and that "no man or
class of men ought, on account of religion, to be invested with peculiar
emoluments or privileges, nor subjected to any penalties or
disabilities, unless, under color of religion, the preservation of
equal liberty and the existence of the state be manifestly endangered."
This distinction between the assertion of a right and the promise to
grant a privilege only needed to be pointed out. But Mr. Madison
evidently meant more; he meant not only that religious freedom should be
assured, but that an Established Church, which, as we have already seen,
he believed to be dangerous to liberty, should be prohibited. Possibly
the convention was not quite ready for this latter step; or possibly its
members thought that, as the greater includes the less, should freedom
of conscience be established a state church would be impossible, and the
article might therefore be stripped of supererogation and verbiage. At
any rate, it was reduced one half, and finally adopted in this simpler
form: "That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner
of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by
force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the
free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience." Thus
it stands to this day in the Bill of Rights of Virginia, and of other
States which subsequently made it their own, possessing for us the
personal interest of being the first public work of the coming
statesman.
Madison was thenceforth for the next forty years a public man. Of the
first Assembly under the new Constitution he was elected a member. For
the next session also he was a candidate, but failed to be returned for
a reason as creditable to him as it was uncommon then, whatever it may
be now, in Virginia. "The sentiments and manners of the parent nation,"
Mr. Rives says, still prevailed in Virginia, "and the modes of
canvassing for popular votes in that country were generally practiced.
The people not only tolerated, but expected and even required, to be
courted and treated. No candidate who neglected those attentions could
be elected." But the times, Mr. Madison thought, seemed "to favor a more
chaste mode of conducting elections," and he "determined to attempt, by
an example, to introduce it." He failed signally; "the sentiments and
manners of the parent nation" were too much for him. He solicited no
votes; nobody got drunk at his expense; and he lost the election. An
attempt was made to contest the return of his opponent on the ground of
corrupt influence, but, adds Mr. Rives, in his sesquipedalian measure,
"for the want of adequate proof to sustain the allegations of the
petition which in such cases it is extremely difficult to obtain with
the requisite precision, the proceeding was unavailing except as a
perpetual protest, upon the legislative records of the country, against
a dangerous abuse, of which one of her sons, so qualified to serve her,
and destined to be one of her chief ornaments, was the early though
temporary victim." Mr. Rives does not mean that Mr. Madison was for a
little while in early life the victim of a vicious habit, but that he
lost votes because he would do nothing to encourage it in others.
The country lost a good representative, but their loss was his gain. The
Assembly immediately elected him a member of the governor's council, and
in this position he so grew in public favor that, two years afterward
(1780), he was chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was
still under thirty, and had he been even a more brilliant young man than
he really was, it would not have been to his discredit had he only been
seen for the next year or two, if seen at all, in the background. He had
taken his seat among men, every one of whom, probably, was his senior,
and among whom were many of the wisest men in the country, not "older"
merely, but "better soldiers."
If not the darkest, at least there was no darker year in the Revolution
than that of 1780. Within a few days of his arrival at Philadelphia,
Madison wrote to Jefferson--then governor of Virginia--his opinion of
the state of the country. It was gloomy but not exaggerated. The only
bright spot he could see was the chance that Clinton's expedition to
South Carolina might be a failure; but within little more than a month
from the date of his letter, Lincoln was compelled to surrender
Charleston, and the whole country south of Virginia seemed about to fall
into the hands of the enemy. Could he have foreseen that calamity, his
apprehensions might have been changed to despair; for he writes:--
"Our army threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or
living on free quarter; the public treasury empty; public credit
exhausted, nay, the private credit of purchasing agents employed, I
am told, as far as it will bear; Congress complaining of the
extortion of the people, the people of the improvidence of
Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most
mature and systematic measures, and the urgency of occasions
admitting only of temporary expedients, and these expedients
generating new difficulties; Congress recommending plans to the
several States for execution, and the States separately rejudging
the expediency of such plans, whereby the same distrust of
concurrent exertions that had damped the ardor of patriotic
individuals must produce the same effect among the States
themselves; an old system of finance discarded as incompetent to
our necessities, an untried and precarious one substituted, and a
total stagnation in prospect between the end of the former and the
operation of the latter. These are the outlines of the picture of
our public situation. I leave it to your own imagination to fill
them up."
He saw more clearly, perhaps, after the experience of one session of
Congress, the true cause of all these troubles; at any rate, he was
able, in a letter written in November of that year (1780), to state it
tersely and explicitly. The want of money, he wrote to a friend, "is the
source of all our public difficulties and misfortunes. One or two
millions of guineas properly applied would diffuse vigor and
satisfaction throughout the whole military department, and would expel
the enemy from every part of the United States."
But nobody knew better than he the difficulty of raising funds except by
borrowing abroad, and that this was a precarious reliance. There must be
some sort of substitute for money. In specific taxation he had no faith.
Such taxes, if paid at all, would be paid, virtually, in the paper
currency or certificates of the States, and these had already fallen to
the ratio of one hundred to one; they kept on falling till they reached
the rate of a thousand to one, and then soon became altogether
worthless. When the estimate for the coming year was under
consideration, he proposed to Congress that the States should be advised
to abandon the issue of this paper currency. "It met," he says, "with so
cool a reception that I did not much urge it." The sufficient answer to
the proposition was, that "the practice was manifestly repugnant to the
Acts of Congress," and as these were disregarded and could not be
enforced, a mere remonstrance would be quite useless. The Union was
little more than a name under the feeble bonds of the Confederation, and
each State was a law unto itself. Not that in this case there was much
reasonable ground for complaint; for what else could the States do?
Where there was no money there must be something to take its place; a
promise to pay must be accepted instead of payment. The paper answered a
temporary purpose, though it was plain that in the end it would be good
for nothing.
The evil, however, was manifestly so great that there was only the more
reason for trying to mitigate it, if it could not be cured. Madison,
like the rest, had his remedy. He proposed, in a letter to one of his
colleagues, that the demand for army supplies should be duly apportioned
among the people, their collection rigorously enforced, and payment made
in interest-bearing certificates, not transferable, but to be redeemed
at a specified time after the war was over. The plan would undoubtedly
have put a stop to the circulation of a vast volume of paper money if
the producers would have exchanged the products of their labor for
certificates, useless at the time of exchange, and having only a
possible prospective value in case of the successful termination of an
uncertain war. Patriotic as the people were, they neither would nor
could have submitted to such a law, nor had Congress the power to
enforce it. But Mr. Madison did not venture apparently to urge his plan
beyond its suggestion to his colleague.
Why the Assembly of Virginia should have proposed to elect an extra
delegate to Congress, early in 1781, is not clear, unless it be that one
of the number, Joseph Jones, being also a member of the Assembly, passed
much of his time in Richmond. It does not appear, however, that the
delegate extraordinary was ever sent, perhaps because it was known to
Mr. Madison's friends that it would be a mortification to him. There was
certainly no good reason for any distrust of either his ability or his
industry. One could hardly be otherwise than industrious who had it in
him--if the story be true--to take but three hours out of the
twenty-four for sleep during the last year of his college course, that
he might crowd the studies of two years into one. He seemed to love work
for its own sake, and he was a striking example of how much virtue there
is in steadiness of pursuit. Not that he had at this time any special
goal for his ambition. His aim seemed to be simply to do the best he
could wherever he might be placed; to discharge faithfully, and to the
best of such ability as he had, whatever duty was intrusted to him. His
report of the proceedings in the congressional session of 1782-83, and
the letters written during those years and the year before, show that he
was not merely diligent but absorbed in the duties of his office.
He was more faithful to his constituents than his constituents sometimes
were to him. Anything that might happen at that period for want of money
can hardly be a matter of surprise; but Virginia, even then, should have
been able, it would seem, to find enough to enable its members of
Congress to pay their board-bills. He complains gently in his Addisonian
way of the inconvenience to which he was put for want of funds. "I
cannot," he writes to Edmund Randolph, "in any way make you more
sensible of the importance of your kind attention to pecuniary
remittances for me, than by informing you that I have for some time past
been a pensioner on the favor of Hayne Solomon, a Jew broker." A month
later he writes, that to draw bills on Virginia has been tried, "but in
vain;" nobody would buy them; and he adds, "I am relapsing fast into
distress. The case of my brethren is equally alarming." Within a week he
again writes: "I am almost ashamed to reiterate my wants so incessantly
to you, but they begin to be so urgent that it is impossible to suppress
them." But the Good Samaritan, Solomon, is still an unfailing reliance.
"The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee
house, is a fund which will preserve me from extremities; but I never
resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all
recompense. The price of money is so usurious that he thinks it ought to
be extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations. To a
necessitous delegate he gratuitously spares a supply out of his private
stock." It is a pretty picture of the simplicity of the early days of
the Republic. Between the average modern member and the money-broker,
under such circumstances, there would lurk, probably, a contract for
carrying the mails or for Indian supplies.
Relief, however, came at last. An appeal was made in a letter to the
governor of Virginia, which was so far public that anybody about the
executive office might read it. The answer to this letter, says Mr.
Madison, "seems to chide our urgency." But there soon came a bill for
two hundred dollars, which, he adds, "very seasonably enabled me to
replace a loan by which I had anticipated it. About three hundred and
fifty more (not less) would redeem me completely from the class of
debtors." It is to be hoped it came without further chiding.[4]
The young member was not less attentive to his congressional duties
because of these little difficulties in the personal ways and means.
Military movements seem, without altogether escaping his attention, to
have interested him the least. In his letters to the public men at home,
which were meant in some degree to give such information as in later
times the newspapers supplied, questions relating to army affairs, even
news directly from the army, occupy the least space. They are not
always, for that reason, altogether entertaining reading. One would be
glad, occasionally, to exchange their sonorous and rounded periods for
any expression of quick, impulsive feeling. "I return you," he writes to
Pendleton, "my fervent congratulations on the glorious success of the
combined armies at York and Gloucester. We have had from the
Commander-in-Chief an official report of the fact,"--and so forth and so
forth; and then for a page or more is a discussion of the condition of
British possessions in the East Indies, that "rich source of their
commerce and credit, severed from them, perhaps forever;" of "the
predatory conquest of Eustatia;" and of the "relief of Gibraltar, which
was merely a negative advantage;"--all to show that "it seems scarcely
possible for them much longer to shut their ears against the voice of
peace." There is not a word in all this that is not quite true,
pertinent, reflective, and becoming a statesman; but neither is there a
word of sympathetic warmth and patriotic fervor which at that moment
made the heart of a whole people beat quicker at the news of a great
victory, and in the hope that the cause was gained at last.
All the letters have this preternatural solemnity, as if each was a
study in style after the favorite Addisonian model. One wonders if he
did not, in the privacy of his own room and with the door locked,
venture to throw his hat to the ceiling and give one hurrah under his
breath at the discomfiture of the vain and self-sufficient Cornwallis.
But he seems never to have been a young man. At one and twenty he
gravely warned his friend Bradford not "to suffer those impertinent fops
that abound in every city to divert you from your business and
philosophical amusements.... You will make them respect and admire you
more by showing your indignation at their follies, and by keeping them
at a becoming distance." It was his loss, however, and our gain. He was
one of the men the times demanded, and without whom they would have been
quite different times and followed by quite different results. The
sombre hue of his life was due partly, no doubt, to natural temperament;
partly to the want of health in his earlier manhood, which led him to
believe that his days were numbered; but quite as much, if not more than
either, to a keen sense of the responsibility resting upon those to whom
had fallen the conduct of public affairs.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 4: The members of Congress were paid, at that time, by the
States they represented. Virginia allowed her delegates their family
expenses, including three servants and four horses, house rent and fuel,
two dollars a mile for travel, and twenty dollars a day when in
attendance on Congress. The members were required to render an account
quarterly of their household expenses, and the State paid them when she
had any money.]