FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS
Madison was a Federalist until, unfortunately, he drifted into the
opposition. He was swept away partly, perhaps, by the influence of
personal friends, particularly of Jefferson, and partly by the influence
of locality,--that "go-with-the-State" doctrine, which is a harmless
kind of patriotism when kept within proper limits, but dangerous in a
mixed government like ours when unrestrained. Had he been born in a free
State it seems more than probable that he would never have been
President; but it is quite possible that his place in the history of his
country would have been higher. The better part of his life was before
he became a party leader. As his career is followed the presence of the
statesman grows gradually dimmer in the shadow of the successful
politician.
In the course of the three sessions of the First Congress the line was
distinctly drawn between the Federal and Republican (or Democratic)
parties. The Federalists, it was evident, had succeeded in firmly
uniting thirteen separate States into one great nation, or into what, in
due time, was sure to become a great nation. It was no longer a loose
assemblage of thirteen independent bodies, revolving, indeed, around a
central power, but with a centrifugal motion that might at any time send
them flying off into space, or destroy them by collisions at various
tangents. Those who opposed the Federalists, however, had no fear of a
tendency to tangents; the danger was, as they believed, of too much
centripetal forces and that the circling planets might fall into the
central sun and disappear altogether. Even if there were no flying off
into space, and no falling into the sun, they had no faith in this sort
of political astronomy. They were unwilling to float in fixed orbits
obedient to a supreme law other than their own.
There is no need to doubt the honesty of either party then, whatever
came to pass in later years. Nor, however, is there any more doubt now
which was the wiser. Before the end of the century the administration of
government was wrested from the hands of those who had created the
Union; and within fifteen years more the Federal party, under that name,
had disappeared. It would not be quite just to say that they were
opposed for no better reason than because they were in power. But it is
quite true that the principles and the policy of the Federalists
survived the party organization; and they not only survived, but, so far
as the opposite party was ever of service to the country, it was when
that party adopted the federal measures. It was in accordance with the
early principles of Federalism that the republic was defended and saved
in the war of 1860-65; as it was the principles of the Democratic
state-rights party, administered by a slaveholding oligarchy, that made
that war inevitable.
Hamilton said, in the well-known Carrington letter in the spring of
1792, that he was thoroughly convinced by Madison's course in the late
Congress that he, "cooperating with Mr. Jefferson, is at the head of a
faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration, and actuated by
views, in my judgment, subversive of the principles of good government,
and dangerous to the union, peace, and happiness of the country." At
first he was disposed to believe, because of his "previous impressions
of the fairness of Mr. Madison's character," that there was nothing
personal or factious in this hostility. But he soon changed his mind. Up
to the time of the meeting of the First Congress there had always been
perfect accord between them, and Hamilton accepted his seat in the
cabinet "under the full persuasion," he said, "that from similarity of
thinking, conspiring with personal good-will, I should have the firm
support of Mr. Madison in the general course of my administration." But
when he found in Madison his most determined opponent, either open or
covert, in the most important measures he urged upon Congress,--the
settlement of the domestic debt, the assumption of the debts of the
States, and the establishment of a national bank,--he was compelled to
seek for other than public motives for this opposition. "It had been,"
he declared, "more uniform and persevering than I have been able to
resolve into a sincere difference of opinion. I cannot persuade myself
that Mr. Madison and I, whose politics had formerly so much the same
point of departure, should now diverge so widely in our opinions of the
measures which are proper to be pursued."
In the letter from which these extracts are made Jefferson and Madison
are painted as almost equally black, though the color was laid the
thicker on Jefferson, if there was any difference. Hamilton seemed to
think that, if Jefferson was the more malicious, Madison was the more
artful. He is accused of an attempt to get the better of the secretary
of the treasury by a trick which was dishonorable in itself, and at the
same time an abuse of the confidence reposed in him by Washington.
Before sending in his message at the opening of the Second Congress the
President submitted it to Madison, who, Hamilton declares, so altered
it, by transposing a passage and by the addition of a few words, that
the President was made to seem, unconsciously to himself, to approve of
Jefferson's proposal to establish the same unit for coins as for
weights. This would have been to disapprove of the proposal of the
secretary of the treasury that the dollar should remain the unit of
coinage. The statement rests on Hamilton's assertion; and as he had
forgotten the words which made the change he complained of, and as the
message was restored to its original form by the President when its
possible interpretation was pointed out to him, it is impossible now to
judge whether Madison may not have been quite innocent of the intention
imputed to him. It is plain enough, however, that Hamilton was sore and
disappointed at Madison's conduct, and that he was quick to seize upon
any incident that justified him in saying, "The opinion I once
entertained of the candor and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison's
character has, I acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that it is
one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind." To justify this
opinion, and as an evidence of how bitter Madison's political and
personal enmity toward him had become, he refers in the same letter to
Madison's relation to Freneau and his paper, "The National Gazette." "As
the coadjutor of Jefferson," he wrote, "in the establishment of this
paper, I include Mr. Madison in the consequences imputable to it."
The story of Freneau need not be repeated here at length, having been
already told in another volume of this series of biographies. If there
were anything in that affair, however, for which Jefferson could be
fairly called to account, Madison may be held as not less responsible.
When the charge was made that he had a sinister motive in procuring for
Freneau a clerkship in the State Department, and in aiding him to
establish a newspaper, Madison frankly related the facts in a letter to
Edmund Randolph. He had nothing to deny except to repel with some
indignation the charge that he had helped to establish the journal in
order that it might "sap the Constitution," or that there was the
slightest expectation or intention on his part of any relation between
the State Department and the newspaper. Freneau was one of his college
friends, a deserving man, to whom he was attached, and whom he was glad
to help. There was nothing improper in commending one well qualified to
discharge its duties for the post of translator in a government office;
and as those duties, for which the yearly salary was only two hundred
and fifty dollars, were light, there was no good reason why the clerk
should not find other employment for leisure hours.
If Mr. Madison, having said this, had stopped there, his critics would
have been silenced. But when he added that he advised his friend with
another motive besides that of helping him to start a newspaper, then,
as the expressive modern phrase is, he "gave himself away." There is a
feeling, common even in those early and innocent days when such things
were rare, that the editor, whose daily bread, whether it be cake or
crust, comes from the bounty of the man in office or other place of
power,--that an editor so fed, and perhaps fattened, is only a servant
bought at a price. Madison said that to help a needy man whom he held in
high esteem was his "primary and governing motive." But he adds: "That,
as a consequential one, I entertained hopes that a free paper ... would
be an antidote to the doctrines and discourses circulated in favor of
monarchy and aristocracy; would be an acceptable vehicle of public
information in many places not sufficiently supplied with it,--this also
is a certain truth." What was this but an acknowledgment of the
essential truth of the charge brought against Jefferson and himself? Not
that he might not devoutly hope for an antidote to the poisonous
doctrines of monarchy and aristocracy, though in very truth the
existence of any such poison was only one of the maggots which, bred in
the muck of party strife, had found a lodgment in his brain; not that it
was not a commendable public spirit to wish for a good newspaper to
circulate where it was most needed; not that it was not a most excellent
thing in him to hold out a helping hand to the friend who had been less
fortunate than himself,--but that, in helping his friend to a clerkship
in a department of the government, his motive was in part that the
possession of a public office would enable the man to establish a party
organ. That was precisely the point of the charge which he seems to have
failed to apprehend,--that public patronage was used at his suggestion
to further party ends.
Freneau had intended to start a newspaper somewhere in New Jersey.
Whether or not that known intention suggested that the project could be
better carried out in Philadelphia, and a clerkship in the State
Department would be an aid to it, the change of plan was adopted and the
clerkship bestowed upon him. The paper--the first number of which
appeared five days after his appointment--was, as it was known that it
would be, an earnest defender of Jefferson and his friends, and a
formidable opponent of Hamilton and his party. The logical conclusion
was that the man, being put in place for a purpose, was diligent in
using the opportunities the place afforded him to fulfill the hopes of
those to whom he was indebted. Madison and Jefferson both denied, with
much heat and indignation, that they had anything to do with the
editorial conduct of the paper. No doubt they spoke the truth. They had
to draw the line somewhere; they drew it there; and an exceedingly sharp
and fine line it was. For it is plain that Freneau knew very well what
he was about and what was expected of him, and his powerful friends knew
very well that he knew it. They could feel in him the most implicit
confidence as an untamed and untamable democrat, and one, perhaps, whose
gratitude would be kept alive by the remembrance of poverty and the hope
of future favors. There was clearly no need of a board of directors for
the editorial supervision of "The National Gazette," and it was quite
safe to deny that any existed. The fact, nevertheless, remained that a
seat had been given the editor at Mr. Jefferson's elbow.
Three months before Madison heard that his relation to Freneau was
bringing him under public censure, he showed an evident interest in the
"Gazette" hardly consistent with his subsequent avowal of having nothing
to do with its management. In a letter to Jefferson he refers to the
postage on newspapers established by the bill for the regulation of
post-offices, and fears that it will prove a grievance in the loss of
subscribers. He suggests that a notice be given that the papers "will
not be put into the mail, but _sent as heretofore_," meaning by that,
probably, that they would be sent under the franks of members of
Congress, or by any other chance that might offer. "Will you," he adds,
"hint this to Freneau? His subscribers in this quarter seem pretty well
satisfied with the degree of regularity and safety with which they get
the papers, and highly pleased with the paper itself." This was careful
dry-nursing for the bantling which had been provided with so comfortable
a cradle in the State Department.
The political casuist of our time may wonder at the importance which
attached to this Freneau affair. We are taught that "there were giants
in those days," but we may also remember that in the modern science of
"practical politics" they were as babes and sucklings. Madison was
making good his place as a leader of the opposition hardly second to
Jefferson himself. As with Hamilton, so with the Federalists generally,
he fell more even than Jefferson fell in their esteem. He fell more,
because he had farther to fall. No man had been more earnest than he
for a consolidated government; no one had shown more activity to bring
about a convention to frame a federal Constitution; and when at last
that work was done, no one, not even Hamilton himself, was more zealous
to convince his countrymen that national salvation depended upon union,
and that union was hopeless unless the Constitution should be adopted.
The disappointment and the shock were all the greater when he gradually
drew off from those who had hitherto counted him as on their side. They
could not understand how he could find so much to oppose in the
legitimate administration--as they believed it to be--of a Constitution
he had done so much to create, and the beneficent results of which he
had foreseen and foretold. Or, if they understood him, it was on the
supposition that he had thrown his convictions and his principles to the
winds, abandoned his old friends and attached himself to new ones, from
motives of personal ambition. This, of course, may not have been
absolutely just. It is quite possible that he did not deliberately
surrender his principles, but persuaded himself that he was as true as
ever to the Constitution. It is, nevertheless, certainly true that the
men with whom he was now acting were the men who, having failed to
prevent the adoption of the Constitution, now aimed, by zealous
endeavors for an assumed strict construction, to defeat the purpose for
which it was framed.[14]
Naturally his motives were suspected, and his conduct narrowly watched.
Jefferson's influence over him was known to be great, and Jefferson had
had nothing to do with the framing of the Constitution, had been
doubtful at first of its wisdom, and gave his assent to it at last with
many doubts. The Anti-Federal party was growing gradually stronger in
Virginia as in all the Southern States; most of Madison's warmest
personal friends, as well as Jefferson, were of that party. What chance
would he have in the public career he had marked out for himself if his
path and theirs led in opposite directions? How much he was influenced
by these considerations it is impossible to tell; perhaps he himself
could not have told. Perhaps they were not even considerations, but only
unconscious influences, which he would have thrown behind him had he
recognized them as possible motives. To others, however, whether justly
or not, they were quite sufficient to explain his course, and, once
accepted, no other explanation was sought for. The appointment of
Freneau to office at Madison's request, followed by the almost immediate
appearance of a violent party organ, edited by this clerk in Mr.
Jefferson's department, was quite enough to raise an outcry among the
Federalists; and Madison's explanation, when it came to be known, of his
share in that business, did not add to his reputation either for
frankness or political rectitude. Perhaps it was at first more the
seeming want of frankness that disgusted his old friends. They could
have more readily forgiven him had he openly declared that he had gone
over to the enemy, instead of professing to find in the Constitution
sufficient ground for hostility to their measures. These constitutional
scruples they sometimes thought so thin a disguise of other motives as
to be better deserving of ridicule than of argument.
All he said and did was watched with suspicion. In the interval between
the First and Second Congresses, he and Jefferson made a tour through
some of the Eastern States, as they said, for relaxation and pleasure.
But it was looked upon as a strategic movement. Interviews between them
and Livingston and Burr in New York were reported to Hamilton as "a
passionate courtship." They visited Albany, it was said, "under the
pretext of a botanical excursion," but in reality to meet with Clinton.
Botany naturally suggests agriculture, and as they continued on their
journey into New England they were accused of "sowing tares" as they
traveled. Such treachery would have been considered as aggravated by
hypocrisy had it been known then that on his return Mr. Madison wrote to
his father from New York: "The tour I lately made with Mr. Jefferson,
of which I have given the outlines to my brother, was a very agreeable
one, and carried us through interesting country, new to us both." This
was cool, if the journey really was a political reconnoissance.
Though Mr. Madison may have been for a time a special target for this
kind of partisan rancor, it was by no means confined to him. Jefferson
had a very pretty talent for exasperating his enemies, and nobody could
long divide with him the distinction of being the best hated man in the
country. A curious instance of it was given when the question was
discussed, both in the First and Second Congresses, as to the successor
to the presidency in case the office should become vacant by the deaths
of both President and Vice-President. A bill was sent down from the
Senate to the House providing, in case such a thing should ever happen,
that the president _pro tempore_ of the Senate, or, should the Senate
have no temporary president, the speaker of the House of
Representatives, should succeed to the vacant office. The House sent
back the bill with an amendment substituting the secretary of state for
the succession in the possible vacancy instead of the presiding officers
of the two houses of Congress. Madison was very earnest for this
amendment, but the Senate rejected it, and the House finally assented to
the original bill. It was shown in the course of the debate that
according to the doctrine of chances the office of president would not
devolve, through the accident of death, upon a third person oftener than
once in about eight hundred and forty years. The rejection of the
amendment naming the secretary of state as the proper person to succeed
to the presidency, in the improbable event supposed, was nevertheless
resented by the Republicans as a direct reflection upon Mr. Jefferson.
Nor did the Federalists deny it. With grim humor they seized upon the
opportunity, apparently, to announce that not with their consent should
he ever be president, even by accident, though he should wait literally
eight hundred and forty years. It was a long-range shot, but there could
not have been one better aimed.
If before there had been some room for hope, Madison's course in the
Second Congress left no doubt as to which party he had cast his lot
with. His hostility to the establishment of a bank was, he thought,
justified by what he saw at the opening of the subscription books in New
York. The anxiety to get possession of the stock was not to him an
evidence of public confidence, and an argument, therefore, in favor of
such an institution, but "a mere scramble for so much public plunder."
He could only see that "stock-jobbing drowns every other subject. The
coffee-house is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers." "It pretty
clearly appears also," he said, "in what proportions the public debt
lies in the country, what sort of hands holding it, and by whom the
people of the United States are to be governed." Here, perhaps, was one
cause of his hostility to Hamilton's financial policy. Its immediate
benefit was for that class whose pecuniary stake in the stability of the
government was the largest. This class was chiefly in the Northern
States, where capital was in money and was always on the lookout for
safe and profitable investment. At the South, capital was in slaves and
land, and could not be easily changed. If the Bank and the bondholders
were to exercise--as he feared they would, and as he believed that the
Federalists meant they should--a controlling influence over the
government, it was certainly pretty apparent "by whom the people of the
United States were to be governed." It would be the North, not the
South; and he was a Virginian before he was a Unionist.
Perhaps he was influenced by this consideration when he proposed that
the payment of the domestic debt should be divided between those who had
originally held, and those who had acquired by purchase, the
certificates of indebtedness. The public creditors would in that case
have been more widely distributed in different sections of the country
and among different classes. The thought, at any rate, does not seem to
have been a new one when he saw and reported the eagerness with which
the bank stock was sought for, denounced it as stock-jobbing and
gambling, and indignantly reflected that in these men he saw the future
governors of the country, and particularly of his own people. No doubt
there was a good deal of speculation; and, as at all such times, there
were a few who made fortunes, while many, who had at first much money
and no stock, next much stock and no money, had at last neither stock
nor money. But Mr. Madison's indignation was quite wasted, and his fears
quite unfounded. Neither the stock-jobbers, the Bank, nor the
bondholders ever usurped the government, whatever may have been
Hamilton's hopes or schemes, if he had any other than to serve his
country. The money-power of the North built cities and ships, factories
and towns, and stretched out its hands to the great lakes and over the
broad prairies, to add to its dominion, to extend its civilization, and
to give to labor and industry their due reward. It was the South that
devoted itself to the business of politics, and, united by stronger
bonds than can ever be forged of gold alone, soon entered into
possession of the government, which it retained and used for its own
interests, without regard to the interests or the rights of the North,
for nearly three quarters of a century. Mr. Madison had no prescience of
any such future in the history of the country, nor, indeed, then had
anybody else. He may have really believed that the holders of a large
public debt and the owners of a great national bank, through which the
monetary affairs of the country could be controlled, were aiming to lay
hold of the government. If all this were true, imminent peril was
impending over republican institutions. The inconsistency of which
Hamilton accused Madison was therefore not necessarily a crime. It
might even be a virtue, and Madison be applauded for his courage in
avowing a change of opinion, if he saw in the practical application of
Hamilton's principles dangers that had not occurred to him when looking
at them only as abstract theories. But the Federalists believed that
Madison, governed by these purely selfish motives, sacrificed his
convictions of what was best for the country that he might secure for
himself a position on what he foresaw was the winning side. It is quite
likely that the more pronounced enmity he showed towards Hamilton during
the second session of Congress was due in some measure to his knowledge
of this feeling towards himself among Federalists. He seemed, at any
rate, to be animated by something more than the proverbial zeal of the
new convert. If it was not always shown in debate, it lurked in his
letters. Anything that came from the secretary, or anything that favored
the secretary's measures, was sure to be opposed by him. He was not, of
course, always in the wrong, and sometimes he was very right. There was
a manifest disposition on the part of the Federalists in the House to
defer to the secretary in a way to provoke opposition from those who did
not share in their estimate of his great ability. There was some
resentment, for example, when it was proposed that Congress should
submit to the secretary the question of ways and means to carry on the
Indian war at the West, after St. Clair's disastrous defeat, and when, a
few days later, it was suggested that he should be called upon to
report a plan for the reduction of the public debt. Members, chief among
them Madison, thought that they were quite capable of discharging the
duties belonging to their branch of the government without instructions
from a head of department whom many of them looked upon as only an
official subordinate of Congress. For the same reason they refused with
prompt decision to permit the secretary to appear upon the floor of the
House to explain some proposed measure. In the Carrington letter
Hamilton said that he had "openly declared" a "determination to treat
him [Madison] as a political enemy." He probably took care that Madison
should hear of it, for he was not a man who made idle threats. He was
sometimes arrogant and overbearing in manner, was always ready for a
fight, which he rather preferred to quietude, and had little disposition
to spare an enemy. These were not conciliating qualities likely to
temper the asperities of political warfare, and they may have provoked
even Madison, mild-mannered and almost timid as he was, to unusual heat.
All this, of course, is aside from the question whether the party, to
which Mr. Madison had given his allegiance, was right or wrong. On that
point there may be an honest difference of opinion. It is apart also
from the question whether a man may not honestly change sides in
politics, notwithstanding the suspicion that always follows him who runs
from one side to the other, when in neither has there been any change
in principles or measures. It is quite possible that he may be governed
by the most sincere convictions; and if he obeys them and abandons old
friends for new ones, or consents to be friendless, it is the strongest
proof the statesman or politician can give of a moral courage which
ought to gain for him all the more respect. But whether that respect
must be denied to Mr. Madison, because he was governed by other and
lower motives, is the question. There had been no change of political
principles either in the party he had left or the party he had joined;
but each was striving with all its might to adapt the old doctrines to
the altered condition of affairs under the new Union. The change was
wholly in Mr. Madison. That which had been white to him was now black;
that which had been black was now as the driven snow. Why was this? Had
he come to see that in all those years he had been wrong? Or had he
suddenly learned, not that he was wrong, but that he had mistaken a
straight and narrow path for the broad road which would lead to the goal
he was seeking? These are not pleasant questions. He had served his
country well; one does not like to doubt whether it was with a selfish
rather than a noble purpose. But of any public man who changed front as
he changed, the question always will be, What moved him? Not to ask it
in regard to Madison is to drop out of sight the turning-point of his
career; not to consider it is to leave unheeded essential light upon
one side of his character. For his own fortunes the choice he made was
judicious, if to "gain the whole world" is always the wisest and best
thing to do. He gained his world, and was wise and virtuous in his
generation according to the vote of a large majority. Whether that
decision still holds good it is not so easy to say; probably it does,
however; for the popular estimate of men often remains unchanged long
after the judgment upon the events which gave them celebrity is
completely reversed. But history, in the long run, weighs with even
scales; and the verdict on Madison's character usually comes with that
pitiful recommendation to mercy from a jury loath to condemn. Admiration
for his great services in the Constitutional Convention and after it,
when its work was presented to the people for their approval, has never
been withheld; upon his official integrity and his high sense of honor
in all his personal relations, except when obligation to party may have
overshadowed it, there rests no cloud; and his intellectual power is
never questioned. One having these recognized qualities, and who for
five and twenty years was generally high in office, must needs be held
in high estimation, especially in a new country where fame, like
everything else, is cheap. Nevertheless, impartial historians, who
venture to believe that nature admits of imperfections in a native of
Virginia, declare their conviction that Mr. Madison either wanted the
strength and courage to resist the influence of those about him, or that
the ambition of the politician was strong enough to overcome any
consideration of principles that might stand in his way.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 14: "I reverence the Constitution," said Fisher Ames in
debate, "and I readily admit that the frequent appeal to that as a
standard proceeds from a respectful attachment to it. So far it is a
source of agreeable reflection. But I feel very different emotions when
I find it almost daily resorted to in questions of little importance.
When by strained and fanciful constructions it is made an instrument of
casuistry, it is to be feared it may lose something in our minds in
point of certainty, and more in point of dignity."]