IN CONGRESS
Madison had grown steadily in the estimation of his colleagues, as is
shown, especially in 1783, by the frequency of his appointment upon
important committees. He was a member of that one to which was intrusted
the question of national finances, and it is plain, even in his own
modest report of the debates of that session, that he took an important
part in the long discussions of the subject, and exercised a marked
influence upon the result. The position of the government was one of
extreme difficulty. To tide over an immediate necessity, a further loan
had been asked of France in 1782, and bills were drawn against it
without waiting for acceptance. It was not very likely, but it was not
impossible, that the bills might go to protest; but even should they be
honored, so irregular a proceeding was a humiliating acknowledgment of
poverty and weakness, to which some of the delegates, Mr. Madison among
them, were extremely sensitive.
The national debt altogether was not less than forty million dollars. To
provide for the interest on this debt, and a fund for expenses, it was
necessary to raise about three million dollars annually. But the sum
actually contributed for the support of the confederate government in
1782 was only half a million dollars. This was not from any absolute
inability on the part of the people to pay more; for the taxes before
the war were more than double that sum, and for the first three or four
years of the war it was computed that, with the depreciation of paper
money, the people submitted to an annual tax of about twenty million
dollars. The real difficulty lay in the character of the Confederation.
Congress might contrive but it could not command. The States might
agree, or they might disagree, or any two or more of them might only
agree to disagree; and they were more likely to do either of the last
two than the first. There was no power of coercion anywhere. All that
Congress could do was to try to frame laws that would reconcile
differences, and bring thirteen supreme governments upon some common
ground of agreement. To distract and perplex it still more, it stood
face to face with a well-disciplined and veteran army which might at any
moment, could it find a leader to its mind, march upon Philadelphia and
deal with Congress as Cromwell dealt with the Long Parliament. There
were some men, probably, in that body, who would not have been sorry to
see that precedent followed. Washington might have done it if he would.
Gates probably would have done it if he could.
To avert this threatened danger; to contrive taxation that should so
far please the taxed that they would refrain from using the power in
their hands to escape altogether any taxation for general purposes,--was
the knotty problem this Congress had to solve in order to save the
Confederacy from dissolution. There was no want of plans and expedients;
neither were there wanting men in that body who clearly understood the
conditions of the problem, and how it might be solved, and whose aim was
direct and unfaltering. Chief among them were Hamilton, Wilson,
Ellsworth, and Madison. However wrong-headed, or weak, or intemperate
others may have been, these men were usually found together on important
questions; differing sometimes in details, but unmoved by passion or
prejudice, and strong from reserved force, they overwhelmed their
opponents at the right moment with irresistible argument and by weight
of character.
In the discussion of the more important questions Mr. Madison is
conspicuous--conspicuous without being obtrusive. A reader of the
debates can hardly fail to be struck with his familiarity with English
constitutional law, and its application to the necessities of this
offshoot of the English people in setting up a government for
themselves. The stores of knowledge he drew upon must needs have been
laid up in the years of quiet study at home before he entered upon
public life. For there was no congressional library then where a member
could "cram" for debate; and--though Philadelphia already had a fair
public library--the member who was armed at all points must have
equipped himself before entering Congress. In this respect Madison
probably had no equal, except Hamilton, and possibly Ellsworth. To the
need of such a library, however, he and others were not insensible. As
chairman of a committee he reported a list of books "proper for the use
of Congress," and advised their purchase. The report declared that
certain authorities upon international law, treaties, negotiations, and
other questions of legislation were absolutely indispensable, and that
the want of them "was manifest in several Acts of Congress." But the
Congress was not to be moved by a little thing of that sort.
The attitude of his own State sometimes embarrassed him in the
satisfactory discharge of his duty as a legislator. The earliest
distinction he won after entering Congress was as chairman of a
committee to enforce upon Mr. Jay, then minister to Spain, the
instructions to adhere tenaciously to the right of navigation on the
Mississippi in his negotiations for an alliance with that power. Mr.
Madison, in his dispatch, maintained the American side of the question
with a force and clearness to which no subsequent discussion of the
subject ever added anything. He left nothing unsaid that could be said
to sustain the right either on the ground of expediency, of national
comity, or of international law; and his arguments were not only in
accordance with his own convictions, but with the instructions of the
Assembly of his own State. It was a question of deep interest to
Virginia, whose western boundary at that time was the Mississippi. But
Virginia soon afterward shifted her position. The course of the war in
the Southern States in the winter of 1780-81 aroused in Georgia and the
Carolinas renewed anxiety for an alliance with Spain. The fear of their
people was that, in case of the necessity for a sudden peace while the
British troops were in possession of those States or parts of them, they
might be compelled to remain as British territory under the application
of the rule of _uti possidetis_. It was urged, therefore, that the right
to the Mississippi should be surrendered to Spain, if it were made the
condition of an alliance. In deference to her neighbors, Virginia
proposed that Mr. Jay should be reinstructed accordingly.
Mr. Madison was not in the least shaken in his conviction. With him, the
question was one of right rather than of expediency. But not many at
that time ventured to doubt that representatives must implicitly obey
the instructions of their constituents. He yielded; but not till he had
appealed to the Assembly to reconsider their decision. The scale was
turned; in deference to the wishes of the Southern States new orders
were sent to Mr. Jay. Mr. Madison, however, had not long to wait for his
justification. When the immediate danger, which had so alarmed the
South, had passed away, Virginia returned to her original position. New
instructions were again sent to her representatives, and Mr. Jay was
once more advised by Congress that on the Mississippi question his
government would yield nothing.
On another question, two years afterward, Mr. Madison refused to accept
a position of inconsistency in obedience to instructions which his State
attempted to force upon him. No one saw more clearly than he how
absolutely necessary to the preservation of the Confederacy was the
settlement of its financial affairs on some sound and just basis; and no
one labored more earnestly and more intelligently than he to bring about
such a settlement. Congress had proposed in 1781 a tax upon imports,
each State to appoint its own collectors, but the revenue to be paid
over to the federal government to meet the expenses of the war. Rhode
Island alone, at first, refused her assent to this scheme. An impost law
of five per cent. upon certain imports and a specific duty upon others
for twenty-five years were an essential part of the plan of 1783 to
provide a revenue to meet the interest on the public debt and for other
general purposes. That Rhode Island would continue obstinate on this
point was more than probable; and the only hope of moving her was that
she should be shamed or persuaded into compliance by the combined
influence of all the other States.
Mr. Madison was as bitter as he could ever be in his reflections upon
that State, whose course, he thought, showed a want of any sense of
honor or of patriotism. Virginia, he argued, should rebuke her by making
her own compliance with the law the more emphatic, as an example for all
the rest. But Virginia did exactly the other thing. At the moment when
debate upon the revenue law was the most earnest, and the prospect of
carrying it the most hopeful; when a committee appointed by Congress had
already started on their journey northward to expostulate with, and if
possible conciliate, Rhode Island,--at that critical moment came news
from Virginia that she had revoked her assent of a previous session to
the impost law. This was equivalent to instructing her delegates in
Congress to oppose any such measure. The situation was an awkward one
for a representative who had put himself among the foremost of those who
were pushing this policy, and who had been making invidious reflections
upon a State which opposed it. The rule that the will of the
constituents should govern the representative, he now declared, had its
exceptions, and here was a case in point. He continued to enforce the
necessity of a general law to provide a revenue, though his arguments
were no longer pointed with the selfishness and want of patriotism shown
by the people of Rhode Island. In the end his firmness was justified by
Virginia, who again shifted her position when the new act was submitted
to her.
The operation of the law was limited to five and twenty years. This
Hamilton opposed and Madison supported; and in this difference some of
the biographers of both see the foreshadowing of future parties. But it
is more likely that neither of those statesmen thought of their
difference of opinion as difference of principle. The question was,
whether anything could be gained by a deference to that party which,
both felt at that time, threatened to throw away, in adhering to the
state-rights doctrine, all that was gained by the Revolution. They were
agreed upon the necessity of a general law, supreme in all the States,
to meet the obligation of a debt contracted for the general good.
Unless--wrote Madison in February--"unless some amicable and adequate
arrangements be speedily taken for adjusting all the subsisting accounts
and discharging the public engagements, a dissolution of the Union will
be inevitable." He was willing, therefore, to temporize, that the
necessary assent of the State to such a law might be gained. Nobody
hoped that the public debt would be paid off in twenty-five years; but
to assume to levy a federal tax in the States for a longer period, or
till the debt should be discharged, might so arouse state jealousy that
it would be impossible to get an assent to the law anywhere. If the law
for twenty-five years should be accepted, the threatened destruction of
the government would be escaped for the present, and it might, at the
end of a quarter of a century, be easy to reenact the law. At any rate,
the evil day would be put off. This was Madison's reasoning.
But Hamilton did not believe in putting off a crisis. He had no faith in
the permanency of the government as then organized. If he were right,
what was the use or the wisdom of postponing a catastrophe till
to-morrow? A possible escape from it might be even more difficult
to-morrow than to-day. The essential difference between the two men was,
that Madison only feared what Hamilton positively knew, or thought he
knew. It was a difference of faith. Madison hoped something would turn
up in the course of twenty-five years. Hamilton did not believe that
anything good could turn up under the feeble rule of the Confederation.
He would have presented to the States, then and there, the question,
Would they surrender to the confederate government the right of taxation
so long as that government thought it necessary? If not, then the
Confederation was a rope of sand, and the States had resolved themselves
into thirteen separate and independent governments. Therefore he opposed
the condition of twenty-five years, and voted against the bill.
Nevertheless, when it became the law he gave it his heartiest support,
and was appointed one of a committee of three to prepare an address,
which Madison wrote, to commend it to the acceptance of the States.
Indeed, the last serious effort made on behalf of the measure was made
by Hamilton, who used all his eloquence and influence to induce the
legislature of his own State to ratify it. It was the law against his
better judgment; but being the law, he did his best to secure its
recognition. But it failed of hearty support in most of the States,
while in New York and Pennsylvania compliance with it was absolutely
refused. Nothing, therefore, would have been lost had Hamilton's
firmness prevailed in Congress; and nothing was gained by Madison's
deference to the doctrine of state rights, unless it was that the
question of a "more perfect Union" was put off to a more propitious
time, when a reconstruction of the government under a new federal
Constitution was possible. Meanwhile Congress borrowed the money to pay
the interest on money already borrowed; the confederate government
floundered deeper and deeper into inextricable difficulties; the
thirteen ships of state drifted farther and farther apart, with a fair
promise of a general wreck.
But the bill contained another compromise which was not temporary, and
once made could not be easily unmade. Agreed to now, it became a
condition of the adoption of the federal Constitution four years later;
and there, as nobody now is so blind as not to see, it was the source of
infinite mischief for nearly a century, till a third reconstruction of
the Union was brought about by the war of 1861-65. The Articles of
Confederation required that "all charges of war and all other expenses
that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare" should
be borne by the States in proportion to the value of their lands. It was
proposed to amend this provision of the Constitution, and for lands
substitute population, exclusive of Indians not taxed, as the basis for
taxation. But here arose at once a new and perplexing question. There
were, chiefly in one portion of the country, about 750,000 "persons held
to service or labor,"--the euphuism for negro slaves which, evolved from
some tender and sentimental conscience, came into use at this period.
Should these, recognized only as property by state law, be counted as
750,000 persons by the laws of the United States?[5] Or should they, in
the enumeration of population, be reckoned, in accordance with the civil
law, as _pro nullis_, _pro mortuis_, _pro quadrupedibus_, and therefore
not to be counted at all? Or should they, as those who owned them
insisted, be counted, if included in the basis of taxation, as fractions
of persons only?
The South contended that black slaves were not equal to white men as
producers of wealth, and that, by counting them as such, taxation would
be unequal and unjust. But whether counted as units or as fractions of
units, the slaveholders insisted that representation should be according
to that enumeration. The Northern reply was that, if representation was
to be according to population, the slaves being included, then the slave
States would have a representation of property, for which there would be
no equivalent in States where there were no slaves; but if slaves were
enumerated as a basis of representation, then that enumeration should
also be taken to fix the rate of taxation.
Here, at any rate, was a basis for an interesting deadlock. One simple
way out of it would have been to insist upon the doctrine of the civil
law; to count the slaves only as _pro quadrupedibus_, to be left out of
the enumeration of population as being no part of the State, as horses
and cattle were left out. But the bonds of union hung loosely upon the
sisters a hundred years ago; there was not one of them who did not think
she was able to set up for herself and take her place among the nations
as an independent sovereign; and it is more than likely that half of
them would have refused to wear those bonds any longer on such a
condition. There was no apprehension then that slavery was to become a
power for evil in the State; but there was intense anxiety lest the
States should fly asunder, form partial and local unions among
neighbors, or become entangled in alliances with foreign nations, at the
sacrifice of all, or much, that was gained by the Revolution. To make
any concession, therefore, to slavery for the sake of the Union was
hardly held to be a concession.
The curious student of history, however, who loves to study those
problems of what might have happened if events that did not happen had
come to pass, will find ample room for speculation in the possibilities
of this one. Had there been no compromise, it is as easy to see now, as
it was easy to foresee then, how quickly the feeble bond of union would
have snapped asunder. But nevertheless, if the North had insisted that
the slaves should neither be counted nor represented at all, or else
should be reckoned in full and taxes levied accordingly, the consequent
dissolution of the Confederacy might have had consequences which then
nobody dreamed of. For it is not impossible, it is not even improbable,
that, in that event, the year 1800 would have seen slavery in the
process of rapid extinction everywhere except in South Carolina and
Georgia. Had the event been postponed in those States to a later period,
it would only have been because they had already found in the
cultivation of indigo and rice a profitable use for slave-labor, which
did not exist in the other slave States, where the supply of slaves was
rapidly exceeding the demand. There can hardly be a doubt that, in case
of the dissolution of the Confederacy, the Northern free-labor States
would soon have consolidated into a strong union of their own. There was
every reason for hastening it, and none so strong for hindering it as
those which were overborne in the union which was actually formed soon
afterward between the free-labor and slave-labor States. To such a
Northern union the border States, as they sloughed off the old system,
would have been naturally attracted; nor can there be a doubt that a
federal union so formed would ultimately have proved quite as strong,
quite as prosperous, quite as happy, and quite as respectable among the
nations, as one purchased by compromises with slavery, followed, as
those compromises were, by three quarters of a century of bitter
political strife ending in a civil war.
But the Northern members were no less ready to make compromises than
Southern members were to insist upon them, these no more understanding
what they conceded than those understood what they gained; for the
future was equally concealed from both. A committee reported that two
blacks should be rated as one free man. This was unsatisfactory. To some
it seemed too large, to others too small. Other ratios, therefore, were
proposed,--three to one, three to two, four to one, and four to three.
Mr. Madison at last, "in order," as he said, "to give a proof of the
sincerity of his professions of liberality,"--and doubtless he meant to
be liberal,--proposed "that slaves should be rated as five to three."
His motion was adopted, but afterward reconsidered. Four days
later--April 1st--Mr. Hamilton renewed the proposition, and it was
carried, Madison says, "without opposition."[6] The law on this point
was the precedent for the mischievous three fifths rule of the
Constitution adopted four years later.
Youth finally overtook the young man during the last winter of his term
in Congress, for he fell in love. But it was an unfortunate experience,
and the outcome of it doubtless gave a more sombre hue than ever to his
life. His choice was not a wise one. Probably Mr. Madison seemed a much
older man than he really was at that period of his life, and to a young
girl may have appeared really advanced in years. At any rate, it was his
unhappy fate to be attached to a young lady of more than usual beauty
and of irrepressible vivacity,--Miss Catherine Floyd, a daughter of
General William Floyd of Long Island, N. Y., who was one of the signers
of the Declaration of Independence, and who was a delegate to Congress
from 1774 to 1783. Miss Catherine's sixteenth birthday was in April of
the latter year; Madison was double her age, as his thirty-second
birthday was a month earlier. His suit, however, was accepted, and they
became engaged. But it was the father rather than the daughter who
admired the suitor; for the older statesman better understood the
character, and better appreciated the abilities, of his young colleague,
and predicted a brilliant career for him. The girl's wisdom was of
another kind. The future career which she foresaw and wanted to share
belonged to a young clergyman, who--according to the reminiscences of an
aged relative of hers--"hung round her at the harpsichord," and made
love in quite another fashion than that of the solemn statesman whom
the old general so approved of. It is altogether a pretty love story,
and one's sympathy goes out to the lively young beauty, who was thinking
of love and not of ambition, as she turned from the old young gentleman,
discussing, with her wise father, the public debt and the necessity of
an impost, to that really young young gentleman who knew how to hang
over the harpsichord, and talked more to the purpose with his eyes than
ever the other could with his lips. There is a tradition that she was
encouraged to be thus on with the new love before she was off with the
old, by a friend somewhat older than herself; and possibly this maturer
lady may have thought that Madison would be better mated with one nearer
his own age. At any rate, the engagement was broken off before long by
the dismissal of the older lover, much to the father's disappointment,
and in due time the young lady married the other suitor. There is no
reason that I know of for supposing that she ever regretted that her
more humble home was in a rectory, when it might have been, in due time,
had she chosen differently, in the White House at Washington, and that
afterward she might have lived, the remaining sixteen years of her life,
the honored wife of a revered ex-President. Perhaps, however, she smiled
in those later years at the recollection of having laughed in her gay
and thoughtless youth at her solemn lover, and that, when at last she
dismissed him, she sealed her letter--conveying to him alone, it may
be, some merry but mischievous meaning--with a bit of rye-dough.[7]
Mr. Rives gives a letter from Jefferson to Madison at this time, which
shows that he stood in need of consolation from his friends. "I
sincerely lament," Mr. Jefferson wrote in his philosophical way, "the
misadventure which has happened, from whatever cause it may have
happened. Should it be final, however, the world presents the same and
many other resources of happiness, and you possess many within yourself.
Firmness of mind and unintermitting occupation will not long leave you
in pain. No event has been more contrary to my expectations, and these
were founded on what I thought a good knowledge of the ground. But of
all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable." It was
Solomon who said, "there be three things which are too wonderful for me,
yea, four which I know not." This fourth was, "the way of a man with a
maid." He might have added a fifth,--the way of a maid with a man,
which, evidently, is what Jefferson meant.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: In some of the States slaves were reckoned as "chattels
personal;" in others as "real estate."]
[Footnote 6: J. C. Hamilton says, in his _History of the Republic_, that
"the motion prevailed by a vote of all the States excepting
Massachusetts and Rhode Island." But his understanding of the question
is in other respects incorrect,--misunderstood, one may hope, rather
than misstated lest he should give credit, for what he considered a
meritorious action, to Madison.]
[Footnote 7: For the details, so far as they can now be recalled, of
this single romantic incident in Mr. Madison's life, I am indebted to
Nicoll Floyd, Esq., of Moriches, Long Island, a great-grandson of
General William Floyd.]