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James Madison

by Sydney Howard Gay · English · Gutenberg #28992 · 563,103 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: James Madison

Author: Sydney Howard Gay


        
Release date: May 29, 2009 [eBook #28992]

Language: English

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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.]




CHAPTER II

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.]




CHAPTER III

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 reënact 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.]




CHAPTER IV

IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY


As the election of the same delegate to Congress for consecutive
sessions was then forbidden by the law of Virginia, Mr. Madison was not
returned to that body in 1784. For a brief interval of three months he
made good use of his time, we are told, by continuing his law studies,
till in the spring of that year he was chosen to represent his county in
the Virginia Assembly. It may be that "the sentiments and manners of the
parent nation," which he lamented seven years before, had passed away,
and nobody now insisted upon the privilege of getting drunk at the
candidate's expense before voting for him. But it is more likely that
the electors had not changed. The difference was in the candidate; they
did not need to be allured to give their votes to a man whom they were
proud to call upon to represent the county. Mr. Madison's reputation was
already made by his three years in Congress, and he now easily took a
place among the political leaders of his own State.

The position was hardly less conspicuous or less influential than that
which he had held in the national Congress. What each State might do
was of quite as much importance as anything the federal government might
or could do. Congress could neither open nor close a single port in
Virginia to commerce, whether domestic or foreign, without the consent
of the State; it could not levy a tax of a penny on anything, whether
goods coming in or products going out, if the State objected. As a
member of Congress, Mr. Madison might propose or oppose any of these
things; as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, he might, if his
influence was strong enough, carry or forbid any or all of them,
whatever might be the wishes of Congress. It was in the power of
Virginia to influence largely the welfare of her neighbors, so far as it
depended upon commerce, and indirectly that of every State in the Union.

In the Assembly, as in Congress, Mr. Madison's aim was to increase the
powers of the federal government, for want of which it was rapidly
sinking into imbecility and contempt. "I acceded," he says, "to the
desire of my fellow-citizens of the county that I should be one of its
representatives in the legislature," to bring about "a rescue of the
Union and the blessings of liberty staked on it from an impending
catastrophe." Early in the session the Assembly assented to the
amendment to the Articles of Confederation proposed at the late session
of Congress, which substituted population for a land valuation as the
basis of representation and of taxation. The Assembly also asserted that
all requisitions upon the States for the support of the general
government and to provide for the public debt should be complied with,
and payment of balances on old accounts should be enforced; and it
assented to the recommendation of Congress that that body should have
power for a limited period to control the trade with foreign nations
having no treaty with the United States, in order that it might
retaliate upon Great Britain for excluding American ships from her West
India colonies. All these measures were designed for "the rescue of the
Union," and they had, of course, Madison's hearty support. For it was
absolutely essential, as he believed, that something should be done if
the Union was to be saved, or to be made worth saving. But there were
obstacles on all sides. The commercial States were reluctant to
surrender the control over trade to Congress; in the planting States
there was hardly any trade that could be surrendered. In Virginia the
tobacco planter still clung to the old ways. He liked to have the
English ship take his tobacco from the river bank of his own plantation,
and to receive from the same vessel such coarse goods as were needed to
clothe his slaves, with the more expensive luxuries for his own
family,--dry goods for his wife and daughter; the pipe of madeira, the
coats and breeches, the hats, boots, and saddles for himself and his
sons. He knew that this year's crop went to pay--if it did pay--for last
year's goods, and that he was always in debt. But the debt was on
running account, and did not matter. The London factor was skillful in
charges for interest and commissions, and the account for this year was
always a lien on next year's crop. He knew, and the planter knew, that
the tobacco could be sold at a higher price in New York or Philadelphia
than the factor got, or seemed to get, for it in London; that the goods
sent out in exchange were charged at a higher price than they could be
bought for in the Northern towns. Nevertheless, the planter liked to see
his own hogsheads rolled on board ship by his own negroes at his own
wharf, and receive in return his own boxes and bales shipped direct from
London at his own order, let it cost what it might. It was a shiftless
and ruinous system; but the average Virginia planter was not over-quick
at figures, nor even at reading and writing. He was proud of being lord
of a thousand or two acres, and one or two hundred negroes, and fancied
that this was to rule over, as Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic
commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular
administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life
of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue,
with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was
largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude
hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and
abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any guest who
would relieve him of his own tediousness; but there was little luxury
and no refinement where there was almost no culture. Of course there
were a few homes and families of another order, where the women were
refined and the men educated; but these were the exceptions. Society
generally, with its bluff, loud, self-confident but ignorant planters,
its numerous poor whites destitute of lands and of slaves, and its mass
of slaves whose aim in life was to avoid work and escape the whip, was
necessarily only one remove from semi-civilization.

It was not easy to indoctrinate such a people, more arrogant than
intelligent, with new ideas. By the same token it might be possible to
lead them into new ways before they would find out whither they were
going. Mr. Madison hoped to change the wretched system of plantation
commerce by a port bill, which he brought into the Assembly. Imposts
require custom-houses, and obviously there could not be custom-houses
nor even custom-officers on every plantation in the State. The bill
proposed to leave open two ports of entry for all foreign ships. It
would greatly simplify matters if all the foreign trade of the State
could be limited to these two ports only. It would then be easy enough
to enforce imposts, and the State would have something to surrender to
the federal government to help it to a revenue, if, happily, the time
should ever come when all the States should assent to that measure of
salvation for the Union. Not that this was the primary object of those
who favored this port law; but the question of commerce was the
question on which everything hinged, and its regulation in each State
must needs have an influence, one way or the other, upon the possibility
of strengthening, even of preserving, the Union. Everything depended
upon reconciling these state interests by mutual concessions. The South
was jealous of the North, because trade flourished at the North and did
not flourish at the South. It seemed as if this was at the expense of
the South, and so, in a certain sense, it was. The problem was to find
where the difficulty lay, and to apply the remedy.

If commerce flourished at the North, where each of the States had one or
two ports of entry only, why should it not flourish in Virginia if
regulated in the same way? If those centres of trade bred a race of
merchants, who built their own ships, bought and sold, did their own
carrying, competed with and stimulated each other, and encroached upon
the trade of the South, why should not similar results follow in
Virginia if she should confine her trade to two or three ports? If the
buyer and the seller, the importer and the consumer, went to a common
place of exchange in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and prosperity
followed as a consequence, why should they not do the same thing at
Norfolk? This was what Madison aimed to bring about by the port bill.
But it was impossible to get it through the legislature till three more
ports were added to the two which the bill at first proposed. When the
planters came to understand that such a law would take away their
cherished privilege of trade along the banks of the rivers, wherever
anybody chose to run out a little jetty, the opposition was persistent.
At every succeeding session, till the new federal Constitution was
adopted, an attempt was made to repeal the act; and though that was not
successful, each year new ports of entry were added. It did not, indeed,
matter much whether the open ports of Virginia were two or whether they
were twenty. There was a factor in the problem which neither Mr. Madison
nor anybody else would take into the account. It was possible, of
course, if force enough were used, to break up the traffic with English
ships on the banks of the rivers; but when that was done, commerce would
follow its own laws, in spite of the acts of the legislature, and flow
into channels of its own choosing. It was not possible to transmute a
planting State, where labor was enslaved, into a commercial State, where
labor must be free.

However desirous Mr. Madison might be to transfer the power over
commerce to the federal government, he was compelled, as a member of the
Virginia legislature, to care first for the trade of his own State. No
State could afford to neglect its own commercial interests so long as
the thirteen States remained thirteen commercial rivals. It was becoming
plainer and plainer every day that, while that relation continued, the
less chance there was that thirteen petty, independent States could
unite into one great nation. No foreign power would make a treaty with a
government which could not enforce that treaty among its own people.
Neither could any separate portion of that people make a treaty, as any
other portion, the other side of an imaginary line, need not hold it in
respect. What good was there in revenue laws, or, indeed, in any other
laws in Massachusetts which Connecticut and Rhode Island disregarded? or
in New York, if New Jersey and Pennsylvania laughed at them? or in
Virginia, if Maryland held them in contempt?

But Mr. Madison felt that, if he could bring about a healthful state of
things in the trade of his own State, there was at least so much done
towards bringing about a healthful state of things in the commerce of
the whole country. There came up a practical, local question which, when
the time came, he was quick to see had a logical bearing upon the
general question. The Potomac was the boundary line between Virginia and
Maryland; but Lord Baltimore's charter gave to Maryland jurisdiction
over the river to the Virginia bank; and this right Virginia had
recognized, claiming only for herself the free navigation of the Potomac
and the Pocomoke. Of course the laws of neither State were regarded when
it was worth while to evade them; and nothing was easier than to evade
them, since to the average human mind there is no privilege so precious
as a facility for smuggling. Nobody, at any rate, seems to have thought
anything about the matter till it came under Madison's observation after
his return home from Congress. To him it meant something more than mere
evasion of state laws and frauds on the state revenue. The subject fell
into line with his reflections upon the looseness of the bonds that held
the States together, and how unlikely it was that they would ever grow
into a respectable or prosperous nation while their present relations
continued. Virtually there was no maritime law on the Potomac, and
hardly even the pretense of any. What could be more absurd than to
provide ports of entry on one bank of a river, while on the other bank,
from the source to the sea, the whole country was free to all comers? If
the laws of either State were to be regarded on the opposite bank, a
treaty was as necessary between them as between any two contiguous
states in Europe.

Madison wrote to Jefferson, who was now a delegate in Congress, pointing
out this anomalous condition of things on the Potomac, and suggesting
that he should confer with the Maryland delegates upon the subject. The
proposal met with Jefferson's approbation; he sought an interview with
Mr. Stone, a delegate from Maryland, and, as he wrote to Madison,
"finding him of the same opinion, [I] have told him I would, by letters,
bring the subject forward on our part. They will consider it, therefore,
as originated by this conversation." Why "they" should not have been
permitted to "consider it as originated" from Madison's suggestion that
Jefferson should have such a conversation is not quite plain; for it was
Madison, not Jefferson, who had discovered that here was a wrong that
ought to be righted, and who had proposed that each State should appoint
commissioners to look into the matter and apply a remedy. So, also, so
far as subsequent negotiation on this subject had any influence in
bringing about the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it was only
because Mr. Madison, having suggested the first practical step in the
one case, seized an opportune moment in that negotiation to suggest a
similar practical step in the other case. As it is so often said that
the Annapolis Convention of 1786 was the direct result of the discussion
of the Potomac question, it is worth while to explain what they really
had to do with each other.

The Virginia commissioners were appointed early in the session on Mr.
Madison's motion. Maryland moved more slowly, and it was not till the
spring of 1785 that the commissioners met. They soon found that any
efficient jurisdiction over the Potomac involved more interests than
they, or those who appointed them, had considered. Existing difficulties
might be disposed of by agreeing upon uniform duties in the two States,
and this the commissioners recommended. But when the subject came before
the Maryland legislature it took a wider range.

The Potomac Company, of which Washington was president, had been
chartered only a few months before. The work it proposed to do was to
make the upper Potomac navigable, and to connect it by a good road with
the Ohio River. This was to encourage the settlement of Western lands.
Another company was chartered about the same time to connect the Potomac
and Delaware by a canal, where interstate traffic would be more
immediate. Pennsylvania and Delaware must necessarily have a deep
interest in both these projects, and the Maryland legislature proposed
that those States be invited to appoint commissioners to act with those
whom Maryland and Virginia had already appointed to settle the conflict
between them upon the question of jurisdiction on the Potomac. Then it
occurred to somebody: if four States can confer, why should not
thirteen? The Maryland legislature thereupon suggested that all the
States be invited to send delegates to a convention to take up the whole
question of American commerce.

While this was going on in Maryland, the Virginia legislature was
considering petitions from the principal ports of the State praying that
some remedy might be devised for the commercial evils from which they
were all suffering. The port bill had manifestly proved a failure. It
was only a few weeks before that Madison had complained, in a letter to
a friend, that "the trade of the country is in a most deplorable
condition;" that the most "shameful frauds" were committed by the
English merchants upon those in Virginia, as well as upon the planters
who shipped their own tobacco; that the difference in the price of
tobacco at Philadelphia and in Virginia was from eleven shillings to
fourteen shillings in favor of the Northern ports; and that "the price
of merchandise here is, at least, as much above, as that of tobacco is
below, the Northern standard." He was only the more confirmed in his
opinion that there was no cure for these radical evils except to
surrender to the confederate government complete control over commerce.
The debate upon these petitions was hot and long. It brought out the
strongest men on both sides, Madison leading those who wished to give to
Congress the power to regulate trade with foreign countries when no
treaty existed; to make uniform commercial laws for all the States; and
to levy an impost of five per cent. on imported merchandise, as a
provision for the public debt and for the support of the federal
government generally. A committee, of which he was a member, at length
reported instructions to the delegates of the State in Congress to labor
for the consent of all the States to these propositions. But in
Committee of the Whole the resolutions were so changed and
qualified--especially in limiting to thirteen years the period for which
Congress was to be intrusted with a power so essential to the existence
of the government--that the measure was given up by its friends as
hopeless.

But before the report was disposed of Mr. Madison prepared a
resolution, to be offered as a substitute, with the hope of reaching the
same end in another way. This resolution provided for the appointment of
five commissioners,--Madison to be one of them,--"who, or any three of
whom, shall meet such commissioners as may be appointed in the other
States of the Union, at a time and place to be agreed on, to take into
consideration the trade of the United States; to examine the relative
situations and trade of said States; to consider how far a uniform
system in their commercial regulations may be necessary to their common
interest and their permanent harmony; and to report to the several
States such an act, relative to this great object, as, when unanimously
ratified by them, will enable the United States, in Congress,
effectually to provide for the same." This he was careful not to offer
himself, but, as he says, it was "introduced by Mr. Tyler, an
influential member, who, having never served in Congress, had more the
ear of the House than those whose services there exposed them to an
imputable bias." He adds that "it was so little acceptable that it was
not then persisted in."

About the same time the action of the Maryland legislature on the
Potomac question, and the report of the Potomac commissioners, came up
for consideration. Mr. Madison said afterward that, as Maryland thought
the concurrence of Pennsylvania and Delaware were necessary to the
regulation of trade on that river, so those States would, probably,
wish to ask for the concurrence of their neighbors in any proposed
arrangement. "So apt and forcible an illustration," he adds, "of the
necessity of an uniformity throughout all the States could not but favor
the passage of a resolution which proposed a convention having that for
its object."

As one of the Potomac commissioners, he knew, of course, what was coming
from Maryland, and "how apt and forcible an illustration" it would seem,
when it did come, of that resolution which he had written and had
induced Mr. Tyler to offer. It did not matter that the resolution had
been at the moment "so little acceptable," and therefore "not then
persisted in." It was where it was sure, in the political slang of our
day, to do the most good. And so it came about. All that Maryland had
proposed, growing out of the consideration of the Potomac question, the
Virginia legislature acceded to. Then, on the last day of the session,
the Madison-Tyler resolution was taken from the table, where it had lain
quietly for nearly two months, and passed. If some, who had been
contending all winter against any action which should lead to a
possibility of strengthening the federal government, failed to see how
important a step they had taken to that very end; if any, who were
fearful of federal usurpation and tenacious of state rights, were blind
to the fact that the resolution had pushed aside the Potomac question
and put the Union question in its place, Mr. Madison, we may be sure,
was not one of that number. He had gained that for which he had been
striving for years.

The commissioners appointed by the resolution soon came together. They
appointed Annapolis as the place, and the second Monday of the following
September (1786) as the time, of the proposed national convention; and
they sent to all the other States an invitation to send delegates to
that convention.

On September 11 commissioners from Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, and New York assembled at Annapolis. Others had been appointed
by North Carolina, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, but
they were not present. Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, and
Connecticut had taken no action upon the subject. As five States only
were represented, the commissioners "did not conceive it advisable to
proceed on the business of their mission," but they adopted an address,
written by Alexander Hamilton, to be sent to all the States.

All the represented States, the address said, had authorized their
commissioners "to take into consideration the trade and commerce of the
United States; to consider how far an uniform system in their commercial
intercourse and regulations might be necessary to their common interest
and permanent harmony." But New Jersey had gone farther than this; her
delegates were instructed "to consider how far an uniform system in
their commercial regulations _and other important matters_ might be
necessary to the common interest and permanent harmony of the several
States." This, the commissioners present thought, "was an improvement on
the original plan, and will deserve to be incorporated into that of a
future convention." They gave their reasons at length for this opinion,
and, in conclusion, urged that commissioners from all the States be
appointed to meet in convention at Philadelphia on the second Monday of
the following May (1787), "to devise such further provisions as shall
appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the federal
government adequate to the exigencies of the Union."

In the course of the winter delegates to this convention were chosen by
the several States. Virginia was the first to choose her delegates;
Madison was among them, and at their head was George Washington.




CHAPTER V

IN THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE


That the Annapolis Convention ever met to make smooth the way for the
more important one which came together eight months afterward and framed
a permanent Constitution for the United States was unquestionably due to
the persistence and the political adroitness of Mr. Madison. But it was
not exceptional work. The same diligence and devotion to public duty
mark the whole of this period of three years through which he continued
a member of the state legislature. As chairman of the judiciary
committee he reduced with much labor the old colonial statutes to a body
of laws befitting the condition of free citizens in an independent
State. From his first to his last session he contended, though without
success, for the faith of treaties and the honest payment of debts. The
treaty with England provided that there should be "no lawful impediment
on either side to the recovery of debts heretofore contracted." The
legislature notified Congress that it should disregard this provision,
on the plea that in relation to "slaves and other property" it had not
been observed by Great Britain. Mr. Madison did not then know that--as
he said three years later--"the infractions [of the treaty] on the part
of the United States preceded even the violation on the other side in
the instance of the negroes." He maintained, nevertheless, that the
settlement of the difficulty, if it had any real foundation, belonged to
Congress, the party to the treaty, and not to a State which had
surrendered the treaty-making power; and that in common honesty one
planter was not relieved from his obligation to pay a London merchant
for goods and merchandise received before the war, because other
planters had not been paid for the negroes and horses they had lost when
the British troops invaded Virginia. At each of the three sessions of
the legislature, while he was a member, he tried to bring that body to
adopt some line of conduct which should not--to use his own
words--"extremely dishonor us and embarrass Congress." It was useless;
the repudiators were quite deaf to any appeals either to their honor or
their patriotism.

On another question both he and his State were more fortunate. Religious
freedom had to be once more fought for, and he was quick to come to the
defense of a right which had first called forth his youthful enthusiasm.
Two measures were brought forward from session to session to secure for
the church the support of the state. The first was a bill for the
incorporation of religious societies; but when it was pushed to its
final passage it provided for the incorporation of Episcopal churches
only. For this Mr. Madison consented to vote, though with reluctance, in
the hope that the church party would be so far satisfied with this
measure as to abstain from pushing another which was still more
objectionable.

He was disappointed. Naturally those who had carried their first point
were the more, not the less, anxious for further success. Now it was
insisted that there should be a universal tax "for the support of
teachers of the Christian religion." The tax-payer was to be permitted
to name the religious society for the support of which he preferred to
contribute. If he declined this voluntary acquiescence in the law, the
money would be used in aid of a school; but from the tax itself none
were to be exempt on any pretext. Madison was quick to see in such a law
the possibility of religious intolerance, of compulsory uniformity
enforced by the civil power, and of the suppression of any freedom of
conscience or opinion. The act did not define who were and who were not
"teachers of the Christian religion," and that necessarily would be left
to the courts to decide. A state church would be the inevitable
consequence; for it was not to be supposed that any dominant sect would
rest till it secured the recognition by law of its own denomination as
the sole representative of the Christian religion. To expect anything
else was to ignore the teachings of all history.

The burden of opposition and debate fell, at first, almost solely upon
Madison. Some of the wisest and best men of the State were slow to see,
as he saw, that religious freedom was in danger from such legislation.
There was, it was said, a sad falling-off in public morality as
indifference to religion increased. There was no cure, it was declared,
for prevalent and growing corruption except in the culture of the
religious sentiment, and the teachers of religion, therefore, must be
upheld and supported. But granting all this, Madison saw that the
proposed remedy would be to give, not bread but a stone, and a stone
that would be used in return as a weapon. It was impossible to regulate
religious belief by act of the Assembly, and therefore it was worse than
foolish to try.

It was due to him that the question was postponed from one session to
the next. A copy of the bill was sent, meanwhile, into every county of
the State for the consideration of the people, and that was aided by a
"Memorial and Remonstrance," written by Madison, which was circulated
everywhere for signature, in readiness for presentation to the next
legislature. The bill, the memorial said, would be "a dangerous abuse of
power," and the signers protested against it with unanswerable
arguments, taking for a starting-point the assertion of the Bill of
Rights, "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." It is not at all improbable that
many signed this remonstrance, not so much because they believed it to
be true as because it was a protest against a tax; that others were more
moved by jealousy of the power of the Episcopal Church than they were by
anxiety to protect religious liberty outside of their own sects. But
whatever the motives, the movement was too formidable to be disregarded.
It was made a test question in the election of members for the
legislature of 1785-86; at that session the bill for the support of
religious teachers was rejected, and in place of it was passed "an act
for establishing religious freedom," written by Jefferson seven years
before. This provided "that no man shall be compelled to frequent or
support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall
be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods,
nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or
belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument
maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall
in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."[8]

In the memorial and remonstrance Madison had said: "If this freedom be
abused, it is an offense against God, not against man. To God,
therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered." If the people
of Virginia did not clearly comprehend this doctrine in all its length
and breadth a hundred years ago, it is not quite easy to say who were
then, or who are now, at liberty to throw stones at them. The assertion
of the broadest religious freedom was no more new then than it is true
that persecution for opinion's sake is now only an ancient evil. It was
not till fifty years after Virginia had refused to tax her citizens for
the support of religious teachers that Massachusetts repealed the law
that had long imposed a similar burden upon her people.

It was in 1786, the last year of Madison's service in the Virginia
Assembly before he returned to Congress, that the craze of paper money
broke out again through all the States. The measure was carried in most
of them, followed in the end by the usual disastrous consequences.
Madison's anxiety was great lest his own State should be carried away by
this delusion, and he led the opposition against some petitions sent to
the Assembly praying for an issue of currency. The vote against it was
too large to be due altogether to his influence; but he gave great
strength and concentration to the opposition. In Virginia, tobacco
certificates supplied in some measure the want of a circulating medium,
and it was, therefore, easier there than in some of the other States to
resist the clamor for a paper substitute for real money. A tobacco
certificate at least represented something worth money. Madison assented
to a bill which authorized the use of such certificates. But his
"acquiescence," he wrote to Washington, "was extorted by a fear that
some greater evil, under the name of relief to the people, would be
substituted." He was "far from being sure," he added, that he "did
right." But no evils with which he had to reproach himself followed that
measure.

These three years of his life were probably among the happiest, if they
were not altogether the happiest, in his long public career. There was
little disappointment or anxiety, and evidently much genuine
satisfaction as he saw how certainly he was gaining a high place in the
estimation of his fellow-citizens for his devotion to the best interests
of his native State. In the recesses of the legislature he had leisure
for studies in which he evidently found great contentment. He traveled a
good deal at intervals, especially at the North; learned much of the
resources and character of the people outside of Virginia, and became
acquainted with the leading men among them. Jefferson urged him to pass
a summer with him in Paris; and some foreign diplomatic service was open
to him, had he expressed a willingness to accept it. But he preferred to
know something more of his own country while he had the leisure; and if
his life was to be passed in public service, as now seemed probable to
him, he chose, at least for the present, to serve his country at home,
where he thought he was more needed, rather than abroad. In his orders
for books sent to Jefferson the direction of his studies is evident. He
sought largely for those which treated of the science of government; but
they were not confined to that subject. Natural history had great charms
for him. He was a diligent student of Buffon, and was anxious to find,
if possible, the plates of his thirty-one volumes, in colors, that he
might adorn the walls of his room with them. He made careful comparisons
between the animals of other continents, as described and portrayed by
the naturalist, and similar orders in America. All new inventions
interested him. "I am so pleased," he writes, "with the new invented
lamp that I shall not grudge two guineas for one of them." He had seen
"a pocket compass of somewhat larger diameter than a watch, and which
may be carried in the same way. It has a spring for stopping the
vibration of the needle when not in use. One of these would be very
convenient in case of a ramble into the western country." A small
telescope, he suggests, might be fitted on as a handle to a cane, which
might "be a source of many little gratifications," when "in walks for
exercise or amusement objects present themselves which it might be
matter of curiosity to inspect, but which it was difficult or impossible
to approach." Jefferson writes him of a new invention, a pedometer; and
he wants one for his own pocket. Trifles like these show the bent of his
mind; and they show a contented mind as well.

While writing of important acts of the legislature of 1785, he is
careful to give other information in a letter to Jefferson, which is not
uninteresting as written ninety-eight years ago, and written by him.

     "I. Rumsey," he says, "by a memorial to the last session,
     represented that he had invented a mechanism by which a boat might
     be worked with little labor, at the rate of from twenty-five to
     forty miles a day, against a stream running at the rate of ten
     miles an hour, and prayed that the disclosure of his invention
     might be purchased by the public. The apparent extravagance of his
     pretensions brought a ridicule upon them, and nothing was done. In
     the recess of the Assembly he exemplified his machinery to General
     Washington and a few other gentlemen, who gave a certificate of the
     reality and importance of the invention, which opened the ears of
     this Assembly to a second memorial. The act gives a monopoly for
     ten years, reserving a right to abolish it at any time by paying
     £10,000. The inventor is soliciting similar acts from other States,
     and will not, I suppose, publish the secret till he either obtains
     or despairs of them."

This intelligence was evidently not unheeded by Jefferson. In writing,
some months after he received it, to a friend on the application of
steam-power to grist-mills, then lately introduced in England, he adds:
"I hear you are applying the same agent in America to navigate boats,
and I have little doubt but that it will be applied generally to
machines, so as to supersede the use of water-ponds, and of course to
lay open all the streams for navigation." Nor does Madison seem to have
been one of those who doubted if anything was to come of Rumsey's
invention. All this was less than a hundred years ago, and now there is
a steam-ferry between New York and Europe running about twice a day.

In a similar letter, a year later, he is careful, among grave political
matters, to remember and report to the same friend that in the sinking
of a well in Richmond, on the declivity of a hill, there had been found,
"about seventy feet below the surface, several large bones, apparently
belonging to a fish not less than the shark; and, what is more
singular, several fragments of potter's ware in the style of the
Indians. Before he [the digger] reached these curiosities he passed
through about fifty feet of soft blue clay." Mr. Madison had only just
heard of this discovery, and he had not seen the unearthed fragments.
But he evidently accepts the story as true in coming from
"unexceptionable witnesses." He adds, as a corroboration, that he is
told by a friend from Washington County of the finding there, in the
sinking of a salt-well, "of the hip-bone of the incognitum, the socket
of which was about eight inches in diameter." Such things were
peculiarly interesting to Jefferson, and Madison was too devoted a
friend to him to leave them unnoticed. But they were hardly less
interesting to himself, though he had not much of Jefferson's habit of
scientific investigation. That "the potter's ware in the style of the
Indians" should be found so deeply buried only seems to him "singular;"
nor, indeed, is there any record, so far as we know, that this
particular fact was any more suggestive to Jefferson, though apparently
so likely to arouse his inquiring mind to seek for some satisfactory
explanation. But his geological notions were too positive to admit even
of a doubt as to the age of man. Supposing a Creator, he assumed that
"he created the earth at once, nearly in the state in which we see it,
fit for the preservation of the beings he placed on it." Theorist as he
was himself, he had little patience with the other theorists who were
already beginning to discover in the structure of the earth the evidence
of successive geological eras. The different strata of rocks and their
inclination gave him no trouble. He explained them all by the assumption
that "rock grows, and it seems that it grows in layers in every
direction, as the branches of trees grow in all directions." That
evidences of the existence of man should be found with a superimposed
weight of earth seventy feet in thickness would present to him no
difficulty. If the fact had specially aroused his attention he would
have explained it in some ingenious way as the result of accident.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 8: With how much interest Jefferson watched the progress of
this controversy he showed in his letters from Paris. In February, 1786,
he wrote to Madison: "I thank you for the communication of the
remonstrance against the assessment. Mazzei, who is now in Holland,
promised me to have it published in the _Leyden Gazette_. It will do us
great honor. I wish it may be as much approved by our Assembly as by the
wisest part of Europe." Again, in December of the same year, he says:
"The Virginia Act for religious freedom has been received with infinite
approbation in Europe, and propagated with enthusiasm. I do not mean by
the governments, but by the individuals who compose them. It has been
translated into French and Italian, has been sent to most of the courts
of Europe, and has been the best evidence of the falsehood of those
reports which stated us to be in anarchy. It is inserted in the
_Encyclopédie_, and is appearing in most of the publications respecting
America. In fact, it is comfortable to see the standard of reason at
length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind had been
held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles; and it is honorable for
us to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare
that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own
opinions!" This latter passage is characteristic, and many who do not
like Jefferson will read between the lines the exultation of a man who
was not always careful to draw the line between religious liberty and
irreligious license.]




CHAPTER VI

PUBLIC DISTURBANCES AND ANXIETIES


In February, 1787, Madison again took a seat in Congress. It was an
anxious period. Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts had assumed rather
formidable possibilities, and seemed not unlikely to spread to other
States. Till this storm should blow over, the important business of
Congress was to raise money and troops; in reality, to go to the help of
Massachusetts, if need should be, though the object ostensibly was to
protect a handful of people on the frontier against the Indians. It was
a striking instance of the imbecility of the government under the
Articles of Confederation, that it could only undertake to suppress
rebellion in a State under the pretense of doing something else which
came within the law. Massachusetts, it is true, was quite able to deal
with her insurgents; but when Congress convened it was not known in New
York that Lincoln had dispersed the main body of them at Petersham.
Nevertheless, a like difficulty might arise at any moment in any other
of the States, where the strength to meet it might be quite inadequate.

Madison's ideal still was, the Union before the States, and for the
sake of the States; the whole before the parts, to save the parts; the
binding the fagot together that the sticks might not be lost. "Our
situation," he wrote to Edmund Randolph in February, "is becoming every
day more and more critical. No money comes into the federal treasury; no
respect is paid to the federal authority; and people of reflection
unanimously agree that the existing Confederacy is tottering to its
foundation. Many individuals of weight, particularly in the eastern
district, are suspected of leaning toward monarchy. Other individuals
predict a partition of the States into two or more confederacies. It is
pretty certain that if some radical amendment of the single one cannot
be devised and introduced, one or the other of these revolutions, the
latter no doubt, will take place."

It is not impossible that Madison himself may have had some faith in
this suspicion that "individuals of weight in the eastern district" were
inclined to a monarchy. For such suspicion, however there could be
little real foundation. There were, doubtless, men of weight who thought
and said that monarchy was better than anarchy. There were, doubtless,
impatient men then who thought and said, as there are impatient men now
who think and say, that the rule of a king is better than the rule of
the people. But there was no disloyalty to government by the people
among those who only maintained that the English in America must draw
from the common heritage of English institutions and English law the
material wherewith to build up the foundations of a new nation. No
intelligent and candid man doubts now that they were wise; nor would it
have been long doubted then, had it not so speedily become manifest
that, if the stigma of "British" was once affixed to a political party,
any appeal from popular prejudice to reason and common sense was
hopeless.

There were a few persons who would have done away with the divisions of
States and establish in their place a central government. Those most
earnest in maintaining the autonomy of States declared that such a
government was, as Luther Martin of Maryland called it, of "a
monarchical nature." What else could that be but a monarchy? An
insinuation took on the form of a logical deduction and became a popular
fallacy. Yet those most earnest for a central government only sought to
establish a stable rule in place of no rule at all; or, worse still, of
the tyranny of an ignorant and vicious mob under the outraged name of
democracy, into which there was danger of drifting. Whether their plan
was wise or foolish, it did not mean a monarchy. Even of Shays's
misguided followers Jefferson said: "I believe you may be assured that
an idea or desire of returning to anything like their ancient government
never entered into their heads." As Madison knew and said, the real
danger was that the States would divide into two confederacies, and only
by a new and wiser and stronger union could that calamity be averted.

To gain the assent of most of the States to a convention was surmounting
only the least of the difficulties. Three weeks before the time of
meeting Madison wrote: "The nearer the crisis approaches, the more I
tremble for the issue. The necessity of gaining the concurrence of the
convention in some system that will answer the purpose, the subsequent
approbation of Congress, and the final sanction of the States, present a
series of chances which would inspire despair in any case where the
alternative was less formidable." He said, in the first month of the
session of that body, that "the States were divided into different
interests, not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances;
the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally
from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes
concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United
States. It did not lie between the large and small States. It lay
between the Northern and Southern."

During the earlier weeks of this session of Congress, and, indeed, for
some months before, events had made so manifest this difference of
interest, coincident with the difference in latitude, that there seemed
little ground for hope that any good would come out of a constitutional
convention. The old question of the navigation of the Mississippi was
again agitated. The South held her right to that river to be of much
more value than anything she could gain by a closer union with the
North, and she was quite ready to go to war with Spain in defense of it.
On the other hand, the Northern States were quite indifferent to the
navigation of the Mississippi, and not disposed apparently to make any
exertion or sacrifice to secure it. Just now they were anxious to secure
a commercial treaty with Spain; but Spain insisted, as a preliminary
condition, that the United States should relinquish all claim to
navigation upon a river whose mouths were within Spanish territory. In
the Northern mind there was no doubt of the value of trade with Spain;
and there was a good deal of doubt whether there was anything worth
contending for in the right to sail upon a river running through a
wilderness where, as yet, there were few inhabitants, and hardly any
trade worth talking about. More than that, there was unquestionably a
not uncommon belief at the North and East that the settlement and
prosperity of the West would be at the expense of the Atlantic States.
Perhaps that view of the matter was not loudly insisted upon; but many
were none the less persuaded that, if population was attracted westward
by the hope of acquiring rich and cheap lands, prosperity and power
would go with it. At any rate, those of this way of thinking were not
inclined to forego a certain good for that which would profit them
nothing, and might do them lasting harm.

For these reasons, spoken and unspoken, the Northern members of Congress
were at first quite willing, for the sake of a commercial treaty, to
concede to Spain the exclusive control of the Mississippi. But to pacify
the South it was proposed that the concession to Spain should be for
only five and twenty years. If at the end of that period the navigation
of the Mississippi should be worth contending for, the question could be
reopened. The South was, of course, rather exasperated than pacified by
such a proposition. The navigation of the river had not only a certain
value to them now, but it was theirs by right, and that was reason
enough for not parting with it even for a limited period. Concessions
now would make the reassertion of the right the more difficult by and
by. If it must be fought for, it would lessen the chance of success to
put off the fighting five and twenty years. Indeed, it could not be put
off, for war was already begun in a small way. The Spaniards had seized
American boats on trading voyages down the river, and the Americans had
retaliated upon some petty Spanish settlements. Spain, moreover, seemed
at first no more inclined to listen to compromise than the South was.

England watched this controversy with interest. She had no expectation
of recovering for herself the Floridas, which she had lost in the war of
the Revolution, and had finally ceded to Spain by the treaty of 1783;
but she was quite willing to see that power get into trouble on the
Mississippi question, and more than willing that it should threaten the
peace and union of the States. Her own boundary line west of the
Alleghanies might possibly be extended far south of the Great Lakes, if
the Northern and Southern States should divide into two confederacies;
but, apart from any lust of territory, she rejoiced at anything that
threatened to check the growth of her late colonies.

Fortunately, however, the question was disposed of, before the
Constitutional Convention met at Philadelphia, by the failure to secure
a treaty. The Spanish minister, Guardoqui, consented, at length, after
long resistance, to accept as a compromise the navigation of the river
for five and twenty years; but Mr. Jay, who was willing, could he have
had his way, to concede anything, found at that stage of the
negotiations he could not command votes enough in Congress to secure a
treaty even in that modified form. Hitherto he had relied upon a
resolution passed by Congress in August, 1786, by the vote of seven
Northern States against five Southern. This, it was assumed, repealed a
resolution of the year before, and authorized the secretary to make a
treaty. The resolution of the year before, August, 1785, had been passed
by the votes of nine States, and was in confirmation of a provision of
the Articles of Confederation declaring that "no treaties with foreign
powers should be entered into but by the assent of nine States." The
minority contended that such a resolution could not be repealed by the
vote of only seven States, for that would be to violate a fundamental
condition of the Articles of Confederation. It is easy to see now that
there ought not to have been a difference among honorable men on such a
point as that. Nevertheless Mr. Jay, supported by some of the strongest
Northern men, held that the votes of seven States could be made, in a
roundabout way, to authorize an act which the Constitution declared
should never be lawful except with the assent of nine States. So the
secretary went on with his negotiations and came to terms with the
Spanish minister.

In April the secretary was called upon to report to Congress what was
the position of these negotiations. Then it first publicly appeared that
a treaty was actually agreed upon which gave up the right to the
Mississippi for a quarter of a century. But it was also speedily made
plain by various parliamentary motions that the seven votes, which the
friends of such a treaty had relied upon, had fallen from seven--even
could that number in the end have been of use--to, at best, four. The
New Jersey delegates had been instructed not to consent to the surrender
of the American right to the use of the Mississippi; a new delegate from
Pennsylvania had changed the vote of that State; and Rhode Island had
also gone over to the other side. "It was considered, on the whole,"
wrote Madison, "that the project for shutting the Mississippi was at an
end."

These details are not unimportant. Forty-five years afterward Madison
wrote that "his main object, in returning to Congress at this time, was
to bring about, if possible, the canceling of Mr. Jay's project for
shutting the Mississippi." Probably it had occurred to nobody then that
within less than twenty years the Province of Louisiana would belong to
the United States, when their right to the navigation of the river could
be no longer disputed. But so long as both its banks from the
thirty-first degree of latitude southward to the Gulf remained foreign
territory, it was of the last importance to the Southern States, whose
territory extended to the Mississippi, that the right of way should not
be surrendered. If a treaty with Spain could be carried that gave up
this right, and the Southern States should be compelled to choose
between the loss of the Mississippi and the loss of the Union, there
could be little doubt as to what their choice would be. It was not a
question to be postponed till after the Philadelphia Convention had
convened; if not disposed of before, the convention might as well not
meet.

Madison's letters, while the question was pending, show great anxiety.
He was glad to know that the South was of one mind on this subject and
would not yield an inch. He was quite confident that his own State would
take the lead, as she soon did, in the firm avowal of Southern opinion.
But he rejoiced that the question did not come up in the Virginia
legislature till after the act was passed to send delegates to the
Philadelphia Convention. That he looked upon as a point gained, and the
delegates were presently appointed; but he still despaired of any good
coming of the convention, unless "Mr. Jay's project for shutting the
Mississippi" could be first got rid of.

In a recent work[9] Mr. Madison is represented as having "struck a
bargain" with the Kentucky delegates to the Virginia Assembly, agreeing
to speak on behalf of a petition relating to the Mississippi question,
provided the delegates from Kentucky--then a part of Virginia--would
vote for the representation of Virginia at Philadelphia. A "bargain"
implies an exchange of one thing for another, and Madison had no
convictions in favor of closing the Mississippi to exchange for a
service rendered on behalf of a measure for which he wished to secure
votes. Moreover, no bargain was necessary. It was not easy to find
anybody in Virginia who needed to be persuaded that the right to the
Mississippi must not be surrendered. Madison wrote to Monroe in October,
1786, that it would "be defended by the legislature with as much zeal as
could be wished. Indeed, the only danger is that too much resentment may
be indulged by many against the federal councils." His only apprehension
was lest the Mississippi question should come up in the Assembly before
the report from the Annapolis Convention should be disposed of, for if
that were accepted the appointment of delegates to Philadelphia was
assured. "I hope," he wrote to Washington in November, "the report will
be called for before the business of the Mississippi begins to ferment."
It happened as he wished. "The recommendation from Annapolis," he wrote
again a week later, "in favor of a general revision of the federal
system was _unanimously_ agreed to" (the emphasis is his own). He
afterward reported to Jefferson "that the project for bartering the
Mississippi to Spain was brought before the Assembly after the preceding
measure had been adopted." There was neither delay nor difficulty in
securing the unanimous consent of the Assembly to resolutions
instructing the members of Congress to oppose any concession to Spain.
But Madison's anxiety was not in the least relieved by the speedy
appointment of delegates to the Philadelphia Convention; for, he wrote
presently to Washington, "I am entirely convinced, from what I observe
here (at Richmond), that, unless the project of Congress can be
reversed, the hopes of carrying this State into a proper federal system
will be demolished." He had already said, in the same letter, that the
resolutions on the Mississippi question had been "agreed to unanimously
in the House of Delegates," and three days before the letter was written
the delegates to Philadelphia had been appointed.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 9: _A History of the People of the United States._ Vol. i. By
John Bach McMaster.]




CHAPTER VII

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION


Mr. Madison is called "the Father of the Constitution." A paper written
by him was laid before his colleagues of Virginia, before the meeting of
the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, and was made the basis of
the "Virginia plan," as it was called, out of which the Constitution was
evolved. In another way his name is so identified with it that one
cannot be forgotten so long as the other is remembered. From that full
and faithful report of the proceedings of the convention, in which his
own part was so active and conspicuous, we know most that we do or ever
can know of the perplexities and trials, the concessions and triumphs,
the acts of wisdom and the acts of weakness, of that body of men whose
coming together time has shown to have been one of the important events
in the history of mankind.

Then it is also true that no man had worked harder, perhaps none had
worked so hard, to bring the public mind to a serious consideration of
affairs and a recognition of the necessity of reorganizing the
government, if the States were to be held together. Never, it seemed,
had men better reason to be satisfied with the result of their labors
when, a few months later, the new Constitution was accepted by all the
States. Yet the time was not far distant when even Madison would be in
doubt as to the character of this new bond of union, and as to what sort
of government had been secured by it. Nor till he had been dead near
thirty years was it to be determined what union under the Constitution
really meant; nor till three quarters of a century after the adoption of
that instrument was the more perfect union formed, justice established,
domestic tranquillity insured, the general welfare promoted, and the
blessings of liberty secured to all the people, which by that great
charter it was intended, in 1787, to ordain and establish. All the
difficulties, which they who framed it escaped by their work, were as
nothing to those which it entailed upon their descendants.

Two parties went into the convention. On one point, of course, they were
agreed, else they would never have come together at all,--that a united
government under the Articles of Confederation was a failure, and,
unless some remedy should be speedily devised, States with common local
interests would gravitate into separate and perhaps antagonistic
nationalities. But the differences between these two parties were
radical, and for a time seemed insurmountable. One proposed simply to
repair the Articles of Confederation as they might overhaul a machine
that was out of gear; the other proposed to form an altogether new
Constitution. One wanted a merely federal government; not, however,
meaning by that term what the other party--soon, nevertheless, to be
known as Federalists--were striving for, but a confederation of States,
each independent of all the rest and supreme in its own right, while
consenting to unite with the rest in a limited government for the
administration of certain common interests.[10]

This idea of the independence of the States was a survival of the old
colonial system, when each colony under its distinct relation to the
crown had attained a growth of its own with its separate interests. Each
of these colonies had become a State. The Revolution had secured to
each, it was maintained, a separate independence, achieved, it was true,
by united efforts, but not therefore binding them together as a single
nation. It was held as a legitimate result of that doctrine that each
State, not the people of the State, whether many or few, should be
represented by the same number of votes in a federal government as they
were under the Articles of Confederation, because such a government was
a union of States, not of a people.

All men, it was argued,--going back to a state of nature,--are equally
free and independent; and when a government is formed every man has an
equal share by natural right in its formation and in its subsequent
conduct. While numbers are few, every member of the State exercises his
individual right in person, and none can rightfully do more than this,
however wise, or powerful, or rich he may be. But when government by the
whole body of the people becomes cumbersome and inconvenient through
increase of numbers, the individual citizen loses none of his rights by
intrusting their exercise to representatives, in choosing and
instructing whom all have an equal voice. So when States are united in a
confederacy each State has the same relation to that government that
individuals have to each other in a single State. They are free and
equal, and none has a larger share of rights in the confederacy because
its people are more numerous, or because it is richer or more powerful,
than the rest. In such a confederacy it is not the individual citizen
who is to be represented, but the individual State. In such a
confederacy there would be the same representation for a State, say of
ten thousand inhabitants, as for one of fifty thousand. This, it was
maintained, preserved equality of suffrage in the equality of States;
while the representation of the individual citizens of the States would
be in reality inequality of suffrage, because the autonomy of the State
would be lost sight of. If in such a case it were asked what had become
of the rights which the majority of forty thousand had inherited from
nature, the answer was that those rights were preserved and represented
in the state government. The difficulty, nevertheless, remained: how to
reconcile in practice this doctrine of the equal rights of States, where
there might be a minority of persons, with the actual rights of the
whole people where, according to the underlying democratic doctrine, the
good of the whole must be decided by the larger number.

Those who proposed only to amend the old Articles of Confederation, and
opposed a new Constitution, objected that a government formed under such
a Constitution would be not a federal but a national government. Luther
Martin said, when he returned to Maryland, that the delegates "appeared
totally to have forgot the business for which we were sent.... We had
not been sent to form a government over the inhabitants of America
considered as individuals.... That the system of government we were
intrusted to prepare was a government over these thirteen States, but
that in our proceedings we adopted principles which would be right and
proper only on the supposition that there were no state governments at
all, but that all the inhabitants of this extensive continent were in
their individual capacity, without government, and in a state of
nature." He added that "in the whole system there was but one federal
feature, the appointment of the senators by the States in their
sovereign capacity, that is, by their legislatures, and the equality of
suffrage in that branch; but it was said that this feature was only
federal in appearance."

The Senate, the second house as it was called in the convention, was in
part created, it is needless to say, to meet, or rather in obedience to,
reasoning like this. There was almost nobody who would have been willing
to abandon the state governments, as there was next to nobody who wanted
a monarchy. "We were eternally troubled," Martin said, "with arguments
and precedents from the British government." He could not get beyond the
fixed notion that those whom he opposed were determined to establish
"one general government over this extensive continent, of a monarchical
nature." If he, and those who agreed with him, sincerely believed this
to be true, it was natural enough that the frequent allusions to British
precedents, as wise rules for American guidance in constructing a
government, should be looked upon as an unmistakable hankering after
lost flesh-pots. Should the state governments be swept away, it might be
that, in time of danger from without or of peril from internal
dissensions, the country, under "a government of a monarchical nature,"
might drift back to its old allegiance. If those who feared, or said
they feared, this were not quite sincere, the temptation was almost
irresistible to use such arguments to arouse popular prejudice against
political opponents. It is curious that Madison seemed quite unconscious
of how much the frequent allusions in his articles in "The Federalist"
to the British Constitution might strengthen these accusations of the
opposition; while he half believed that the same thing in others showed
in them a leaning toward England, from which he knew that he himself was
quite free.

The Luther Martin protestants were too radical to remain in the
convention to the end, when they saw that such a confederacy as they
wanted was impossible. But there were not many who went the length they
did in believing that a strong central government was necessarily the
destruction of the state governments. Still fewer were those who would
have brought this about if they could. That the rights of the States
must be preserved was the general opinion and determination, and it was
not difficult to do this by limiting the powers of the higher
government, or federal as it soon came to be called, and by the
organization of the second house, the Senate, in which all the States
had an equal representation. The smaller States were satisfied with this
concession, and the larger were willing to make it, not only for the
sake of the Union, but because of the just estimate in which they held
the rights belonging to all the States alike. The real difficulty, as
Madison said in the debate on that question, and as he repeated again
and again after that question was settled, was not between the larger
and smaller States, but between the North and the South; between those
States that held slaves and those that had none.

Slavery in the Constitution, which has given so much trouble to the
Abolitionists of this century, and indeed to everybody else, gave quite
as much in the last century to those who put it there. Many of the
wisest and best men of the time, Southerners as well as Northerners, and
among them Madison, were opposed to slavery. They could see little good
in it, hardly even any compensation for the existence of a system so
full of evil. There was hardly a State in the Union at that time that
had not its emancipation society; and there was hardly a man of any
eminence in the country who was not an officer, or at least a member, of
such a society. Everywhere north of South Carolina, slavery was looked
upon as a misfortune which it was exceedingly desirable to be free from
at the earliest possible moment; everywhere north of Mason and Dixon's
line, measures had already been taken, or were certain soon to be taken,
to put an end to it; and by the ordinance for the government of all the
territory north of the Ohio River it was absolutely prohibited by
Congress in the same year in which the Constitutional Congress met.

But it was, nevertheless, a thing to the continued existence of which
the anti-slavery people of that time could consent without any violation
of conscience. Bad as it was, unwise, wasteful, cruel, a mockery of
every pretense of respect for the rights of man, they did not believe it
to be absolutely wicked. If they had so believed, let us hope they would
have washed their hands of it. As it was, it was only a question of
expediency whether, for the sake of the Union, they should protect the
system of slavery, and give to the slaveholders, as slaveholders, a
certain degree of political power. To refuse to admit a slaveholding
State into the Union did not occur, probably, to the most earnest
opponent of the system; for that would have been simply to say that
there should be no Union. That was what Madison meant in saying so
repeatedly that the real difficulty in the way was, not the difference
between the large and the small States, but the difference between the
slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States. If there could be no
conciliation on that point there could be no Union.

Some hoped, perhaps, rather than believed, that slavery was likely to
disappear ere long at the South as it was disappearing at the North. It
is an impeachment of their intelligence, however, to suppose that they
relied much upon any such hope. The simple truth is that slavery was
then, as it continued to be for three quarters of a century longer, the
paramount interest of the South. To withstand or disregard it was not
merely difficult, but was to brave immediate possible dangers and
sufferings, which are never voluntarily encountered except in obedience
to the highest sense of duty; or to meet a necessity, from which there
was no manly way of escape. The sense of absolute duty was wanting; the
necessity, it was hoped, might be avoided by concessions. It can only be
said for those who made them that they did not see what fruitful seeds
of future trouble they were sowing in the Constitution.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 10: Those who were zealous for state rights, and opposed to a
central government, called the system they wished to reëstablish a
Federal System,--a confederacy of States. It was too convenient and
probably too popular a term to be lost, and the other party adopted it
when the new Constitution was formed. _The Federalist_ was the name
chosen for the volume in which were collected the papers, written first
under the signature of "A Citizen of New York," but afterward changed to
"Publius," in support of the new Constitution, by Hamilton, Madison, and
Jay. In one of the earlier papers Mr. Hamilton refers to the Articles of
Confederation, which were to be superseded, as the Federal Constitution;
but in the later papers Madison is careful to refer to the proposed form
of government as the Federal Constitution, and Federal soon came to be
the distinguishing name of the party which first came into power under
the new Constitution. Whatever may be said of Madison's other title, his
right to that of father of the Federal party can hardly be disputed.]




CHAPTER VIII

"THE COMPROMISES"


The question with the North was, how far could it yield; with the South,
how far could it encroach. It turned mainly on representation,--on "the
unimportant anomaly," as Mr. George Ticknor Curtis calls it in his
"History of the Constitution," "of a representation of men without
political rights or social privileges." However much they differed upon
the subject in the convention, there was nobody then and there who
regarded the question as "unimportant;" nor was there a political event
to happen for the coming eighty years that it did not influence and
generally govern. There were some who maintained at first that the slave
population should not be represented at all. Hamilton proposed in the
first days of the convention "that the rights of suffrage in the
national legislature ought to be proportioned to the number of free
inhabitants." Madison was willing to concede this in one branch of the
legislature, provided that in the representation in the other house the
slaves were counted as free inhabitants. The constitution of the Senate
subsequently disposed of that proposition.

But why should slaves be represented at all? "They are not free agents,"
said Patterson, a delegate to the convention from New Jersey; they "have
no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring property, but, on the
contrary, are themselves property, and, like other property, entirely at
the will of the master. Has a man in Virginia a number of votes in
proportion to the number of his slaves? And if negroes are not
represented in the States to which they belong, why should they be
represented in the general government?... If a meeting of the people was
actually to take place in a slave State, would the slaves vote? They
would not. Why, then, should they be represented in a federal
government?" There could be but one reply, but that was one which it
would not have been wise to make. It was slave property that was to be
represented, and this would not be submitted to among slaveholders as
against each other, while yet they were a unit in insisting upon it in a
union with those who were not slaveholders. Among themselves slavery
needed no protection; their safety was in equality. But to their great
interest every non-slaveholder was, in the nature of things, an enemy;
and prudence required that the power either to vote him down or to buy
him up should never be wanting. It was as much a matter of instinct as
of deliberation, for love of life is the first law. The truth was
covered up in Madison's specious assertion that "every peculiar
interest, whether in any class of citizens or any description of
States, ought to be secured as far as possible." The only "peculiar"
interest, however, belonging either to citizens or States, that was
imbedded in the Constitution, was slavery.

So Wilson of Pennsylvania asked: "Are they [the slaves] admitted as
citizens--then why are they not admitted on an equality with white
citizens? Are they admitted as property--then why is not other property
admitted into the computation?" He was willing, however, to concede that
it was a difficulty to be "overcome by the necessity of compromise."

Never, probably, in the history of legislation, was there a more serious
question debated. Compromise is ordinarily understood to mean an
adjustment by mutual concessions, where there are rights on both sides.
Here it meant whether the side which had no shadow of right whatever to
that which it demanded would consent to take a little less than the
whole. It was the kind of compromise made between the bandit and his
victim when the former decides that he will not put himself to the
trouble of shooting the other, and will even leave him his shirt. It was
not difficult to understand that horses and cattle could be justly
counted only where property was to be the basis of representation. Yet
the slaves, who were counted, were, in the eye of the law, either
personal property or real estate, and were no more represented as
citizens than if they also had gone upon all fours. Their enumeration,
nevertheless, was carried, and it so increased the representative power
of their masters that inequality of citizenship became the fundamental
principle of the government. This, of course, was to form an oligarchy,
not a democracy. Practically the government was put in the hands of a
class, and there it remained from the moment of the adoption of the
Constitution to the rebellion of 1860; while that class, including those
of so little consequence as to own only a slave or two, in its best
estate, probably never exceeded ten per centum of the whole people.

There was, if one may venture to say so, a singular confusion in the
minds of the venerable fathers of the republic on this subject. They
could not quite get rid of the notion that the slaves, being human,
ought to be included in the enumeration of population, notwithstanding
that their enumeration as citizens must necessarily disappear in their
representation as chattels. Slaves, as slaves, were the wealth of the
South, as ships, for example, were the wealth of the North; but, being
human, the mind was not shocked at having the slaves reckoned as
population in fixing the basis of representation, though in reality they
only represented the masters' ownership. But nobody would have been at a
loss to see the absurdity of counting three fifths of the Northern ships
as population. Even a Webster Whig of sixty-five years later could,
perhaps, have understood that that was something more than an
"unimportant anomaly." There was no clearer-headed man in the
convention than Gouverneur Morris; yet he said that he was "compelled to
declare himself reduced to the dilemma of doing injustice to the
Southern States or to human nature, and he must do it to the former." C.
C. Pinckney of South Carolina declared that he was "alarmed" at such an
avowal as that. Yet had the question been one of counting three fifths
of the Northern ships in the enumeration of population, Morris would
have discovered no "dilemma," and Pinckney nothing to be "alarmed" at.
So palpable an outrage on common sense would have been merely laughed at
by both.

[Illustration: Charles Cotesworth Pinckney]

In reply to Pinckney, however, Morris grew bolder. "It was high time,"
he said, "to speak out." He came there "to form a compact for the good
of America. He hoped and believed that all would enter into such
compact. If they would not, he was ready to join with any States that
would. But as the compact was to be voluntary, it is in vain for the
Eastern States to insist on what the Southern States will never agree
to. It is equally vain for the latter to require what the other States
can never admit, and he verily believed the people of Pennsylvania will
never agree to a representation of negroes;" of negroes, he meant,
counted as human beings, not for their own representation, but, as ships
might be counted, for the increased representation of those who held
them as property. The next day he "spoke out" still more plainly. "If
negroes," he said, "were to be viewed as inhabitants, ... they ought to
be added in their entire number, and not in the proportion of three
fifths. If as property, the word 'wealth' was right,"--as the basis,
that is, of representation. The distinction that had been set up by
Madison and others between the Northern and Southern States he
considered as heretical and groundless. But it was persisted in, and "he
saw that the Southern gentlemen will not be satisfied unless they see
the way open to their gaining a majority in the public councils....
Either this distinction [between the North and the South] is fictitious
or real; if fictitious, let it be dismissed, and let us proceed with due
confidence. If it be real, instead of attempting to blend incompatible
things, let us at once take a friendly leave of each other."

But could they take "a friendly leave of each other"? Should a union be
secured on the terms the South offered? or should it be declined, as
Morris proposed, if it could not be a union of equality? The next day
Madison again set forth the real issue, quietly but unmistakably. "It
seemed now," he said, "to be pretty well understood that the real
difference of interests lay, not between the large and small, but
between the Northern and Southern States. The institution of slavery and
its consequences formed the line of discrimination." There is sometimes
great power, as he well knew, in firm reiteration. So long as slavery
lasted, the lesson he then inculcated was never forgotten.
Thenceforward, as then, "the line of discrimination," in Southern
politics, lay with "slavery and its consequences." One side would abate
nothing of its demands; there could be no "friendly leave" unless the
determination, on the other side, to overcome the desire for union and
take the consequences was equally firm.

When the question again came up, however, Morris had not lost heart. His
talk was the talk of a modern abolitionist:--

     "He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery. It was a
     nefarious institution. It was the curse of Heaven on the States
     where it prevailed. Compare the free regions of the Middle States,
     where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and
     happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty which
     overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other
     States having slaves. Travel through the whole continent, and you
     behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and
     disappearance of slavery.... Proceed southwardly, and every step
     you take through the great regions of slavery presents a desert
     increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings.
     Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the
     representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens, and let them
     vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included?
     The houses in this city [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the
     wretched slaves who cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.... And
     what is the proposed compensation to the Northern States for a
     sacrifice of every principle of right, of every impulse of
     humanity? They are to bind themselves to march their militia for
     the defense of the Southern States, for their defense against those
     very slaves of whom they complain. They must supply vessels and
     seamen in case of foreign attack. The legislature will have
     indefinite power to tax them by excises and duties on imports, both
     of which will fall heavier on them than on the Southern
     inhabitants; for the Bohea tea used by a Northern freeman will pay
     more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave, which
     consists of nothing more than his physical subsistence and the rags
     that cover his nakedness.... Let it not be said that direct
     taxation is to be proportioned to representation. It is idle to
     suppose that the general government can stretch its hand directly
     into the pockets of the people scattered over so vast a country....
     He would sooner submit himself to a tax for paying for all the
     negroes in the United States than saddle posterity with such a
     Constitution."

So much of this as was not already fact was prophecy. Yet not many weeks
later this impassioned orator put his name to the Constitution, though
it had grown meanwhile into larger pro-slavery proportions. There was
undoubtedly some sympathy with him among a few of the members; but the
general feeling was more truly expressed a few days later by Rutledge of
South Carolina, in the debate on the continuance of the African slave
trade. "Religion and humanity," he said, "had nothing to do with this
question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations. The
true question at present is, whether the Southern States shall or shall
not be parties to the Union. If the Northern States consult their
interest, they will not oppose the increase of slaves, which will
increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers." The
response came from Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth saying: "Let every
State import what it pleases. The morality or wisdom of slavery are
considerations belonging to the States themselves. What enriches a part
enriches the whole,"--especially Newport and its adjacent coasts, he
might have added, with its trade to the African coast.

But a Virginian, George Mason, had another tone. He called the traffic
"infernal." "Slavery," he went on, "discourages arts and manufactures.
The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the
emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They
produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is
born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As
nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be
in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence
punishes national sins by national calamities."

These were warnings worth heeding. But Ellsworth retorted with a sneer:
"As he had never owned a slave, he could not judge of the effect of
slavery on character." He said, however, that, "if it was to be
considered in a moral light, we ought to go farther, and free those
already in the country." But, so far from that, he thought it would be
"unjust toward South Carolina and Georgia," in whose "sickly rice
swamps" negroes died so fast, should there be any intermeddling to
prevent the importation of fresh Africans to labor, and, of course, to
perish there. Perhaps it was this shrewd argument of the Connecticut
delegate that suggested, half a century afterward, to a Mississippi
agricultural society, the economical calculation that it was cheaper to
use up a gang of negroes every few years, and supply its place by a
fresh gang from Virginia, than rely upon the natural increase that would
follow their humane treatment as men and women. His colleague, Roger
Sherman, came to Ellsworth's aid. It would be, he thought, the duty of
the general government to prohibit the foreign trade in slaves, and,
should this be left in its power, it would probably be done. But he
would not, if the Southern States made it the condition of consenting to
the Constitution that the trade should be protected, leave it in the
power of the general government to do that which he acknowledged that it
should and probably would do.

Delegates from Georgia and the Carolinas declared that to be the
condition,--among them C. C. Pinckney of South Carolina. "He should
consider," he said, "a rejection of the clause as an exclusion of South
Carolina from the Union." Nevertheless he said to the people at home,
when they came together to consider the Constitution: "We are so weak
that by ourselves we could not form a union strong enough for the
purpose of effectually protecting each other. Without union with the
other States, South Carolina must soon fall." On the part of that State
it had been a game of brag all along. The first lesson in the South
Carolinian policy was given in the Constitutional Convention. Of the
result, this was Pinckney's summing up to his constituents:--

     "By this settlement we have secured an unlimited importation of
     negroes for twenty years; nor is it declared that the importation
     shall be then stopped; it may be continued. We have a security that
     the general government can never emancipate them, for no such
     authority is granted.... We have obtained a right to recover our
     slaves, in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is
     a right we had not before. In short, considering all circumstances,
     we have made the best terms, for the security of this species of
     property, it was in our power to make. We would have made better if
     we could, but on the whole I do not think them bad."

A more moderate and a more significant statement could hardly have been
made.

On the foreign slave trade Madison had little to say, but, like most of
the Southern delegates north of the Carolinas, he was opposed to it.
"Twenty years," he said, "will produce all the mischief that can be
apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be
more dishonorable to the American character than to say nothing about
it in the Constitution." The words are a little ambiguous, though he is
his own reporter. But what he meant evidently was, that any protection
of the trade would dishonor the nation; for at another point of the
debate, on the same day, he said that "he thought it wrong to admit in
the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men." Such
property he was anxious to protect as the great Southern interest, so
long as it lasted; but he was not willing to strengthen it by permitting
the continuance of the African slave trade for twenty years longer under
the sanction of the Constitution. But he held it to be, as he wrote in
"The Federalist," "a great point gained in favor of humanity that a
period of twenty years may terminate forever within these States a
traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of
modern policy." He added, "The attempt that had been made to pervert
this clause into an objection against the Constitution, by representing
it as a criminal toleration of an illicit practice," was a
misconstruction which he did not think deserving of an answer.

It was, in fact, a bargain which he had not approved of, and did not now
probably care to talk about. It was made at the suggestion of Gouverneur
Morris, who moved that the foreign slave trade, a navigation act, and a
duty on exports be referred for consideration to a committee. "These
things," he said, "may form a bargain among the Northern and Southern
States." When the committee reported in favor of the slave trade, C. C.
Pinckney proposed that its limitation should be extended from 1800 to
1808. Gorham of Massachusetts seconded the motion, and it was carried by
the addition of the votes of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and
Connecticut to those of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Georgia.

The committee also reported the substitution of a majority vote for that
of two thirds in legislation relating to commerce. The concession was
made without much difficulty, a Georgia delegate and three of the four
South Carolina delegates favoring it, two of the latter frankly saying
they did so to gratify New England. It was, C. C. Pinckney said, "the
true interest of the Southern States to have no regulation of commerce;"
but he assented to this proposition, and his constituents "would be
reconciled to this liberality," because, among other considerations, of
"the liberal conduct [of the New England States] towards the views of
South Carolina." There was no question of the meaning of this sudden
avowal of friendly feeling. Jefferson relates in his "Ana," on the
authority of George Mason, a member of the convention, that Georgia and
South Carolina had "struck up a bargain with the three New England
States, that if they would admit slaves for twenty years, the two
southernmost States would join in changing the clause which required two
thirds of the legislature in any vote."

The settlement of these questions was an opportune moment for the
introduction of that relating to fugitive slaves. Butler of South
Carolina immediately proposed a section which should secure their return
to their masters, and it was passed without a word. As Pinckney said in
the passage already quoted, when he went back to report to his
constituents, "it is a right to recover our slaves, in whatever part of
America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before."

It is notable how complete and final a settlement of the slavery
question "these compromises," as they were called, seemed to be to those
who made them. They were meant to be, as Mr. Madison called them,
"adjustments of the different interests of different parts of the
country," and being once agreed upon they were considered as having the
binding force and stability of a contract. The evils of slavery were set
forth as an element in the negotiation, but no question of essential
morality was raised that brought the system within the category of
forbidden wrong. Whatever results might follow would be limited, it was
thought, by the terms of the contract; whereas, in fact, the actual
results were not foreseen, and could not be guarded against, except by
the refusal to enter into any contract whatever.

On all other questions involving political principles,--the just
relations of the federal government and the governments of the States;
the relations between the larger and the smaller States; the regulation
of the functions of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial
departments of government,--on all these the framers of the
Constitution brought to bear the profoundest wisdom. When one reflects
upon the magnitude and character of the work, Madison's conclusion seems
hardly extravagant, that "adding to these considerations the natural
diversity of human opinions on all new and complicated subjects, it is
impossible to consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed
as less than a miracle." There were, nevertheless, the gravest and most
anxious doubts how far the Constitution would stand the test of time;
yet as a system of government for a nation of freemen it remains to this
day practically unchanged. But where its architects thought themselves
wisest they were weakest. That which they thought they had settled
forever was the one thing which they did not settle. Of all the
"adjustments" of the Constitution, slavery was precisely that one which
was not adjusted.

Madison's responsibility for this result was that of every other
delegate,--no more and no less. Neither he nor they, whether more or
less opposed to slavery, saw in it a system so subversive of the rights
of man that no just government should tolerate it. That was reserved for
a later generation, and even that was slow to learn. To the fathers it
was, at worst, only an unfortunate and unhappy social condition, which
it would be well to be rid of if this could be done without too much
sacrifice; but otherwise, to be submitted to, like any other
misfortune.

While it did exist, however, Madison believed it should be protected,
though not encouraged, as a Southern interest. The question resolved
itself into one of expediency,--of union or disunion. What disunion
would be, he knew, or thought he knew. Perhaps he was mistaken.
Disunion, had it come then, might have been the way to a true union. "We
are so weak," said C. C. Pinckney, "that by ourselves we could not form
a union strong enough for the purpose of effectually protecting each
other. Without union with the other States, South Carolina must soon
fall." But he was careful to say this at home, not in Philadelphia. In
the convention, Madison wrote a month after it adjourned, "South
Carolina and Georgia were inflexible on the point of the slaves." What
was to be the union which that inflexibility carried was not foreseen.
It was the children's teeth that were to be set on edge.




CHAPTER IX

ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION


Madison's labors for the Constitution did not cease when the convention
adjourned, although he was not at that moment in a hopeful frame of mind
in regard to it. Within a week of the adjournment he wrote to Jefferson:
"I hazard an opinion that the plan, should it be adopted, will neither
effectually answer its national object, nor prevent the local mischiefs
which excite disgusts against the state governments."

But this feeling seems to have soon passed away. Perhaps, when he
devoted himself to a careful study of what had been done, he saw, in
looking at it as a whole, how just and true it was in its fair
proportions. He now diligently sought to prove how certainly the
Constitution would answer its purpose; how wisely all its parts were
adjusted; how successfully the obstacles to a perfect union of the
States had been, as he thought, overcome; how carefully the rights of
the separate States had been guarded, while the needed general
government would be secured. Whether there should be an American nation
or not depended, as he had believed for years, upon whether a national
Constitution could be agreed upon. Now that it was framed he believed
that upon its adoption depended whether there should be, or should not
be, a nation. In September, as he wrote to Jefferson, he was in doubt;
in February he wrote to Pendleton: "I have for some time been persuaded
that the question on which the proposed Constitution must turn is the
simple one, whether the Union shall or shall not be continued. There is,
in my opinion, no middle ground to be taken."

Those who would have called a second convention to revise the labors of
the first had no sympathy from him. He not only doubted if the work
could be done so well again; he doubted if it could be done at all. With
him, it was this Constitution or none. "Every man," he said in "The
Federalist," referring to a picture he had just drawn of the perils of
disunion,--"every man who loves peace, every man who loves his country,
every man who loves liberty, ought to have it ever before his eyes, that
he may cherish in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America,
and be able to set a due value on the means of preserving it." This
"means" was the Constitution.

Of the eighty papers of "The Federalist" he wrote twenty-nine; Hamilton
writing forty-six, and Jay only five. These famous essays, of wider
repute than any other American book, are yet more generally accepted
upon faith than upon knowledge. But at that time, when the new
Constitution was in the mind and on the tongue of every thoughtful man,
they were eagerly read as they followed each other rapidly in the
columns of a New York newspaper. They were an armory, wherein all who
entered into the controversy could find such weapons as they could best
handle. What governments had been, what governments ought to be, and
what the political union of these American States would be under their
new Constitution, were questions on which the writers of these papers
undertook to answer all reasonable inquiries, and to silence all cavils.
Madison would undoubtedly have written more than his two fifths of them,
had he not been called upon early in March to return to Virginia; for
the work was of the deepest interest to him, and the popularity of the
papers would have stimulated to exertion one as indolent as he was
industrious.

But the canvass for the election of delegates to the Constitutional
Convention of Virginia called him home. He had been nominated as the
representative of his county, and his friends had urged him to return
before the election, for there was reason to fear that the majority was
on the wrong side. Henry, Mason, Randolph, Lee, and others among the
most influential men of Virginia, were opposed to the Constitution.
There must be somebody in the convention to meet strong men like these,
and Madison was urged to take the stump and canvass for his own
election. Even this he was willing to do at this crisis, if need be,
though he said it would be at the sacrifice of every private
inclination, and of the rule which hitherto from the beginning of his
public career he had strictly adhered to,--never to ask, directly or
indirectly, for votes for himself.

It is quite possible, even quite probable, that Mr. Madison had little
of that gift which has always passed for eloquence, and is, indeed,
eloquence of a certain kind. If we may trust the reports of his
contemporaries, though he wanted some of the graces of oratory, he was
not wanting in the power of winning and convincing. His arguments were
often, if not always, prepared with care. If there was no play of fancy,
there was no forgetfulness of facts. If there was lack of imagination,
there was none of historical illustration, when the subject admitted it.
If manner was forgotten, method was not. His aim was to prove and to
hold fast; to make the wrong clear, and to put the right in its place;
to appeal to reason, not to passion, nor to prejudice; to try his cause
by the light of clear logic, hard facts, and sound learning; to convince
his hearers of the truth, as he believed in it, not to take their
judgment captive by surprise with harmonious modulation and grace of
movement. Not his neighbors only, but the most zealous of the
Federalists of the State, sent him to the convention. It was there that
such eloquence as he possessed was peculiarly needed. The ground was to
be fought over inch by inch, and with antagonists whom it would be
difficult, if not impossible, to beat. There was to be contest over
every word of the Constitution from its first to its last. "Give me
leave," cried Patrick Henry in his opening speech, "to demand what right
had they to say 'We the people' instead of 'We the States'?" He began at
the beginning. It was the gage of the coming battle; the defenders were
challenged to show that any better union than that already in existence
was needed, and that in this new Constitution a better union was
furnished.

As month after month passed away while the Constitution was before the
people for adoption, the anxiety of the Federalists grew, lest the
requisite nine States should not give their assent. But when eight were
secured there was room to hope even for unanimity, if Virginia should
come in as the ninth. Should she say Yes, the Union might be perfect;
for the remaining States would be almost sure to follow her lead. But
should she say No, the final result would be doubtful, even if the
requisite nine should be secured by the acquiescence of one of the
smaller States. This answer could not, of course, depend altogether upon
one man, but it did depend more upon Madison than upon anybody else.

The convention was in session nearly a month. At the end of a fortnight
he was not hopeful. "The business," he wrote to Washington, "is in the
most ticklish state that can be imagined. The majority will certainly be
very small, on whatever side it may finally lie; and I dare not
encourage much expectation that it will be on the favorable side." But
his fears stimulated rather than discouraged him. He was always on his
feet; always ready to meet argument with argument; always prompt to
appeal from passion to reason; quick to brush aside mere declamation,
and to bring the minds of his hearers back to a calm consideration of
how much was at stake, and of the weight of the responsibility resting
on that convention. Others were no less earnest and diligent than he;
but he was easily chief, and the burden and heat of the day fell mainly
upon him. Probably when the convention assembled the majority were
opposed to the Constitution; but its adoption was carried at last by a
vote of eighty-nine to seventy-nine. Thenceforth opposition in the
remaining States was hopeless.

New Hampshire--though the fact was not known in Virginia--preceded that
State by a few days in accepting the Constitution, so that the requisite
nine were secured before the convention at Richmond came to a decision.
But it was her decision, nevertheless, that really settled, so far as
can be seen now, the question of a permanent Union. Had the vote of
Virginia been the other way it is not likely that Hamilton would have
carried New York, or that North Carolina and Rhode Island would have
finally decided not to be left in solitude outside. What the history of
the nine united States only, with four disunited States among them,
might have been, it is impossible to know, and quite useless to
conjecture. The conditions which some of the States attached to the act
of adoption, the addition of a Bill of Rights, proposed amendments to
the Constitution, and the suggestion of submitting it to a second
convention, were matters of comparatively little moment, when the
majority of ten delegates was secured at Richmond. These were questions
that could be postponed. "The delay of a few years," Madison wrote to
Jefferson, "will assuage the jealousies which have been artificially
created by designing men, and will at the same time point out the faults
which call for amendment."

Immediately after the adjournment of the Richmond Convention he returned
to New York, where the confederate Congress was still in session. That
body had little to do now but decide upon the time and place of the
inauguration of the new government. Madison had entered upon his
thirty-eighth year, and we get an interesting glimpse of him as he
appeared at this time of his life to an intelligent foreigner. "Mr.
Warville Brissot has just arrived here," he wrote to Jefferson in
August, 1788. This was Brissot de Warville, a Frenchman of the new
philosophy,--whose head, nevertheless, his compatriots cut off a few
years later,--then traveling in America to observe the condition and
progress of the new republic. His tour extended to nearly all the
States; he met with most of the distinguished men of the country; and he
made a careful and intelligent use of his many opportunities for
observation. On his return to France he wrote an entertaining
volume,--"New Travels in the United States of America,"--still to be
found in some old libraries. What he says of Madison is worth repeating,
not only for the impression he made upon an observant stranger, but as
the evidence of the contemporary estimate of his character and
reputation, which De Warville must have gathered from others.

     "The name of Madison," he writes, "celebrated in America, is well
     known in Europe by the merited eulogium made of him by his
     countryman and friend, Mr. Jefferson.

     "Though still young, he has rendered the greatest services to
     Virginia, to the American Confederation, and to liberty and
     humanity in general. He contributed much, with Mr. White, in
     reforming the civil and criminal codes of his country. He
     distinguished himself particularly in the convention for the
     acceptation of the new federal system. Virginia balanced a long
     time in adhering to it. Mr. Madison determined to it the members of
     the convention by his eloquence and logic. This republican appears
     to be about thirty-eight years of age. He had, when I saw him, an
     air of fatigue; perhaps it was the effect of the immense labors to
     which he has devoted himself for some time past. His look announces
     a censor, his conversation discovers the man of learning, and his
     reserve was that of a man conscious of his talents and of his
     duties.

     "During the dinner, to which he invited me, they spoke of the
     refusal of North Carolina to accede to the new Constitution. The
     majority against it was one hundred. Mr. Madison believed that this
     refusal would have no weight on the minds of the Americans, and
     that it would not impede the operations of Congress. I told him
     that though this refusal might be regarded as a trifle in America,
     it would have great weight in Europe; that they would never inquire
     there into the motives which dictated it, nor consider the small
     consequence of this State in the confederation; that it would be
     regarded as a germ of division, calculated to retard the operations
     of Congress; and that certainly this idea would prevent the
     resurrection of American credit.

     "Mr. Madison attributed this refusal to the attachment of a great
     part of the inhabitants of that State to their paper money and
     their tender act. He was much inclined to believe that this
     disposition would not remain a long time."

In October the Virginia Assembly met. Two thirds of its members were
opposed to the new Constitution, and at their head was Patrick Henry,
his zeal against it not in the least abated because he had been defeated
in the late convention. The acceptance of the Constitution by that
representative body could not be recalled. But the Assembly could, at
least, protest against it, and was led by Henry to call upon Congress to
convene a second national convention to do over again the work of the
first. The legislature was to elect senators for the first Senate under
the new government; and it was also to divide the State into districts
for its representation in the lower house of Congress. In ordinary
fairness, as the State had, in a popular convention, so recently
accepted the Constitution, the party then in the majority was entitled
to at least one of the representatives in the Senate. But Henry
nominated both, and could command votes enough to elect them. In modern
party usage this would seem quite unobjectionable; indeed, a modern
politician who should not use such an advantage for his party would be
considered as unfit for practical politics. But a hundred years ago it
was thought sharp practice, and a fair proportion of Henry's partisans
refused to be bound by it. One of Henry's nominees was elected by a
majority of twenty over Madison; but in the case of the other that
majority was reduced more than half, and a change of five more votes
would have elected Madison.

He had, however, neither expected nor wished to be sent to the Senate,
while he did hope to be elected to the House of Representatives. The
Senate was intended to be the more dignified body, requiring in its
members a certain style of living for which wealth was indispensable.
Madison had not the means to give that kind of social support to
official position; but he could afford to belong to that body where a
member was not the less respectable because his whole domestic
establishment might be a bachelor's room in a boarding-house.

Virginia was, as he wrote to Washington, "the only instance among the
ratifying States in which the politics of the legislature are at
variance with the sense of the people, expressed by their
representatives in convention." This had enabled Henry and a majority
of his friends to elect senators who, representing "the politics of the
legislature," did not represent "the sense of the people" in regard to
the national Constitution. But in the election of members of the House
of Representatives, the sense of the people was to be again appealed to,
and a new way must be devised for asserting the supremacy of legislative
power. The cleverness of Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, many years
later, under similar circumstances, introduced a new word into the
language of the country, and, it was supposed at the time, a new device
in American politics. But what has since been known as "Gerrymandering"
was really the invention of Patrick Henry. This method of arranging
counties into congressional districts in accordance with their political
affinities, without regard to their geographical lines, Henry attempted
to do with Mr. Madison's own county. By joining it to distant counties
it was expected that an anti-Federal majority would be secured large
enough to insure his defeat. The attempt to elect him to the Senate was,
Madison wrote to Jefferson, "defeated by Mr. Henry, who is omnipotent in
the present legislature." He adds that Henry "has taken equal pains, in
forming the counties into districts for the election of representatives,
to associate with Orange such as are most devoted to his politics, and
most likely to be swayed by the prejudices excited against me." The
scheme, however, was unsuccessful, perhaps partly because of the
indignation which so dishonorable a measure to defeat a political
opponent excited throughout the State. Madison entered upon an active
canvass of his district against James Monroe, who had been nominated as
a moderate anti-Federalist, and defeated him. It was winter time, and in
the exposure of some of his long rides his ears were frozen. In later
life he sometimes laughingly pointed to the scars of these wounds
received, he said, in the service of his country.

Thus Henry's "Gerrymander," like many another useful and curious device,
brought neither profit nor credit to the original inventor. Had Henry
acted in the broader spirit of the modern politician, who sees that he
serves himself best who serves his party best, he would have disposed of
every Federal county in the State as he disposed of Orange. As it was,
he only aroused a good deal of indignation and defeated himself by
openly aiming to gratify his personal resentments. Had he scattered his
shot for the general good of the party, he would, perhaps, have brought
down his particular bird.




CHAPTER X

THE FIRST CONGRESS


The confederate Congress, at its final session in 1788, had fixed the
time for the election of President and Vice-President under the
Constitution, and the time and place for the meeting of the first
Congress of the new government. The day appointed was the first
Wednesday of the following March, and, as that date fell on the fourth
of the month, a precedent was established which has ever since been
observed in the installation of a new President. The place was not so
easily determined. The choice lay between New York and Philadelphia, and
the struggle was prolonged, not because the question of the temporary
seat of government was of much moment, but because of the influence the
decision might have upon the future settlement of the permanent place
for the capital.

No quorum of the new Congress was present at New York on March 4, 1789,
and neither house was organized until early in April. On the 23rd
Washington arrived; and on the 30th he took the oath of office as first
President of the United States, standing on the balcony of Federal
Hall, at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, a site now occupied by
another building used as the subtreasury. A week before, when the
ceremonies proper for such an occasion were a subject of discussion in
Congress, the question of fitting titles for the President and
Vice-President came up for consideration. It was decided that when the
President arrived the Vice-President should meet him at the door of the
senate chamber, lead him to the chair, and then, in a formal address,
inform him that the two houses were ready to witness the administration
of the oath of office. "Upon this," says John Adams in a letter written
three years afterward, "I arose in my place and asked the advice of the
Senate, in what form I should address him, whether I should say 'Mr.
Washington,' 'Mr. President,' 'Sir,' 'May it please your Excellency,' or
what else? I observed that it had been common while he commanded the
army to call him 'His Excellency,' but I was free to own it would appear
to me better to give him no title but 'Sir,' or 'Mr. President,' than to
put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda, or one of his own
ambassadors, or a governor of any one of our States."

Thereupon the question went to a conference committee of both houses,
who reported that no other title would be proper for either President or
Vice-President, at any time, than those which were given by the
Constitution. To this report the Senate disagreed and appointed a new
committee. This proposed that the President should be called "His
Highness the President of the United States and Protector of their
Liberties." When wise men are absurd they presume on their prerogative.
The Senate accepted the report, but the House had the good sense to
reject it, consenting, however, to leave the question in abeyance. On
these proceedings Mr. Madison thus commented in a letter to Jefferson:--

     "My last inclosed copies of the President's inaugural speech, and
     the answer of the House of Representatives. I now add the answer of
     the Senate. It will not have escaped you that the former was
     addressed with a truly republican simplicity to George Washington,
     President of the United States. The latter follows the example,
     with the omission of the personal name, but without any other than
     the constitutional title. The proceeding on this point was, in the
     House of Representatives, spontaneous. The imitation by the Senate
     was extorted. The question became a serious one between the two
     houses. J. Adams espoused the cause of titles with great
     earnestness. His friend, R. H. Lee, although elected as a
     republican enemy to an aristocratic Constitution, was a most
     zealous second. The projected title was, His Highness the President
     of the United States and the Protector of their Liberties. Had the
     project succeeded, it would have subjected the President to a
     severe dilemma, and given a deep wound to our infant government."

Washington has sometimes been accused of wishing for the title of "His
Highness," and of having suggested it. Had this been true, Madison
would have been certain to know it, and he was quite incapable of
asserting in that case that such a title would have been to the
President "a severe dilemma." About Mr. Adams he was perhaps mistaken,
as he might easily have been, since he was not a member of the Senate,
and probably heard only a confused report of how the question was
brought before that body. As Mr. Adams's letter, quoted just now, shows,
he regarded the charge as a calumny and resented it. He gave them,
according to his own statement, no other opinion than that he preferred
"Sir," or "Mr. President," as a more proper address than "Excellency," a
title then, as now, pertaining to governors of States. He probably took
no further part in the debate, but it is not impossible that he may in
private have avowed a preference for some other and higher title than
either "Mr. President" or "Your Excellency." "For," he said in the
explanatory letter to his friend, "I freely own that I think decent and
moderate titles, as distinctions of offices, are not only harmless, but
useful in society; and that in this country, where I know them to be
prized by the people as well as their magistrates as highly as by any
people or any magistrates in the world, I should think some distinction
between the magistrates of the national government and those of the
state governments proper." A distinction might be proper enough if there
were to be any titles whatever; but certainly they were the wiser who
preferred good homespun to threadbare old clothes. Had rags of that sort
been made a legal uniform, it is almost appalling to reflect upon the
absurdities to which the national fondness for titles would have carried
us.

From March 4 to April 1, though the House of Representatives met daily,
there were not members enough present to make a quorum. The first real
business brought before the House, except that relating to its
organization, was introduced by Madison, two days after the
inauguration. It was a proposition to raise a revenue by duties on
imports, and by a tonnage duty on all vessels, American and foreign,
bringing goods, wares, or merchandise into the United States. The
essential weakness of the late Confederacy was, first of all, to be
remedied by uniform rules for the regulation of trade. Revenue must be
provided for the support of government, and that in a way which should
not be oppressive to the people. Commerce, Mr. Madison said, "ought to
be as free as the policy of nations will admit," but government must be
supported, and taxes the least burdensome and most easily collected are
those derived from duties on imports. He agreed, however, as he said on
the second day of the debate, with those who would so adjust the duties
on foreign goods as to protect the "infant manufactories" of the
country. With little interruption this subject was debated for the first
six weeks of the opening session of the First Congress. No other could
have been hit upon to test so thoroughly the strength of the new bond
of union. It was to brush aside all those trade regulations in the
several States which each had hitherto thought essential to its
prosperity. Every interest in the country was to be considered, and
their different, sometimes opposing, claims to be reconciled.

New England was sure that, should the tax on molasses be too high, the
distilleries would be shut up, and a great New England industry
destroyed. Nor would the injury stop there. The fisheries, as well as
the distilleries, would be ruined. For three fifths of the fish put up
for the West Indies could find no market anywhere else; and a market
existed there only because molasses was taken in exchange. A prohibitory
duty on that article, or a duty that should seriously interfere with its
importation, would wellnigh destroy the fisheries. What then would
become of the nursery of American seamen? With no seamen there would be
no shipbuilding. What sadder picture than this of a New England without
rum, without codfish, without seamen, and without ships! One can easily
conceive that even in that restrained and dignified First Congress there
was no want of serious and alarmed expostulation, and even some
threatening talk from such men as the tranquil Goodhue, the thoughtful
and scholarly Ames, and the impulsive Gerry.

Then the South, for her part, was alarmed lest, among other things, too
high a tonnage duty should leave her tobacco, her rice and indigo,
rotting in the fields and warehouses for want of ships to take them to
market. She had no ships of her own and could have none, and she invited
the ships of the rest of the world to come for her products and bring in
return all she needed for her own consumption. The picture of the
possible ruin of New England was as nothing to that of the Southern
planter scanning the horizon with weary eyes in vain for the sight of a
sail, while behind him was a dangerous crowd of hungry blacks with
nothing to do. That desolation seemed complete to the southernmost
States when it was also proposed to levy a tax of ten dollars upon every
slave imported. In short, the whole subject bristled with difficulties.
The problem was nothing more nor less than how to tax everything, and at
the same time convince everybody that the scheme was for the general
good, while nobody's special interests were sacrificed. The "infant
industries," to which Mr. Madison alluded, really received no special
consideration in the final adjustment, and they were too feeble then
even to cry for nursing. They have grown stronger since, though they are
"infants" still; and they should never cease to be grateful to him who,
however unwittingly, gave them a name to live by for a hundred years.

But the most remarkable part of the debate was that upon the proposition
of Mr. Parker of Virginia to impose a duty upon the importation of
slaves. Could the progress of events have been foreseen, that proposal
might have been regarded as meant to protect an "infant industry" of the
northernmost slave States. But the wildest imagination then could not
conceive of the domestic slave trade of a few years later, when a chief
source of the prosperity of Virginia would be her perennial crop of
young men and women to be shipped for New Orleans and a market. But Mr.
Parker had no ulterior motive when he avowed his regret that the
Constitution had failed to prohibit the importation of slaves from
Africa, and hoped that the duty he proposed would prevent, in some
degree, a traffic which he pronounced "irrational and inhuman." It would
have been difficult to have found a Virginian of that day who would not
have taken down his shotgun on hearing that there were miscreants
prowling about his kitchen doors in the hope of buying up the strongest
young people of his household for export to the Southwest.

Judging from the imperfect report of the debate upon the subject, it
would seem that the bargain relative to the slave trade, made in the
Constitutional Convention of two years before between New England and
the two southernmost States, might still hold good. Or there may have
been a new bargain; or, perhaps, both sides trusted to a tacit
recognition of the eternal fitness of things, and made common cause
where legislation threatened at the same time the distillery and the
slave-ship.[11] At any rate, the extreme Southerners expressed surprise
at the audacity which would disturb a compromise of the Constitution;
the extreme Northerners deprecated it as quite uncalled for in any
consideration of the subject of revenue. The principle of Mr. Parker's
motion, Mr. Sherman of Connecticut thought, was to correct a moral evil;
the principle of the bill before the House was to raise a revenue. At
some other time he would be willing to consider the question of taxing
the importation of negroes on the ground of humanity and policy; but it
was a sufficient reason with him for not admitting it as an object of
revenue that the burden would fall upon two States only. Fisher Ames of
Massachusetts could only take counsel of his conscience. From his soul,
he said, he detested slavery; and--forgetting, apparently, that this
tax was provided for by the Constitution--he doubted whether imposing it
"would not have the appearance of authorizing the practice" of trading
in slaves. This was his reason for wishing to postpone the subject. But
Mr. Livermore of New Hampshire was more ingenious still. If the imported
negroes were goods, wares, or merchandise, they would come within the
title of the bill, and be taxed under the general rule of five per
centum, which would be about the same rate as ten dollars a head; but if
they were not goods, wares, or merchandise, then such importation could
not properly be included in the consideration of the question of a
revenue from duties on such articles of trade.

Mr. Madison came to the help of his colleague, and brushed aside the
sophistries of the New England allies of the slave traders. If there
were anything wanting in the title of the bill to cover this particular
duty, it was easy to add it. If the question was not one of taxation
because it was one of humanity, it would be quite as difficult to deal
with it under any other bill for levying a duty as under this. If the
tax seemed unjust because it bore heavily upon a single class, that
would be a good reason for remitting many taxes which there was no
hesitation in imposing. If ten dollars seemed a heavy duty, a little
calculation would show that it was only about the proposed _ad valorem_
duty of five per centum on most other importations. "It is to be
hoped," he added, "that by expressing a national disapprobation of this
trade we may destroy it, and save ourselves from reproaches, and our
posterity the imbecility ever attendant on a country filled with
slaves." "If there is any one point," he continued, "in which it is
clearly the policy of this nation, so far as we constitutionally can, to
vary the practice obtaining under some of the state governments, it is
this.... It is as much the interest of Georgia and South Carolina as of
any in the Union. Every addition they receive to their number of slaves
tends to weaken and render them less capable of self-defense.... It is a
necessary duty of the general government to protect every part of the
empire against danger, as well internal as external. Everything,
therefore, which tends to increase this danger, though it may be a local
affair, yet, if it involves national expense or safety, becomes of
concern to every part of the Union, and is a proper subject for the
consideration of those charged with the general administration of the
government." No Northern man, except Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts,
supported this measure; and none from the Southern States, except three
of the Virginia members, with Madison leading. As the foreign slave
trade was protected in the Constitution for twenty years by a bargain
between the two southernmost States and New England, so now the same
influence staved off the imposition of the tax which was a part of the
consideration to be given for that constitutional protection of the
trade. It is not a creditable fact; but it is, nevertheless, a fact and
a representative one in the history of the United States. And it is to
Madison's great honor that he had neither part nor lot in it.

After six weeks of earnest debate, an amicable and satisfactory
agreement was made to impose a moderate duty upon pretty much everything
imported, except slaves from Africa. It was literally a tariff for
revenue; but it was a settlement that settled nothing definitely, except
that the provision of the Constitution for a tax of ten dollars on
imported slaves should be a dead letter. Thenceforth the policy of free
trade was established, so far as African slaves were concerned, till the
traffic was supposed to cease by constitutional limitation and Act of
Congress in 1808.[12]

The determination to protect the commercial interests of the country,
beyond the point of mere revenue, was more manifest in fixing the rate
of duty upon tonnage than in duties upon importations. It was generally
agreed, after much debate, that American commerce had better be in
American hands, and a difference of twenty cents a ton was made between
the tax upon domestic and that upon foreign ships, as a measure of
protection to American shipping. Mr. Madison proposed to make it still
larger, but the House would only agree to increase it to forty cents on
ships belonging to powers with which the United States had no treaties.
The Senate, however, refused to admit this distinction, and insisted
that all foreign ships should be subject to the same tonnage duty
without regard to existing treaties. The House assented, lest the bill
should be lost altogether. This proposed differential duty on foreign
vessels was as clearly aimed at Great Britain as if that power had been
named in the bill. Nor, indeed, was there any attempt at concealment;
for it was openly avowed that America had no formidable rival except the
English, who already largely controlled the commerce of the United
States. In the debates and in the final decision of the question is
shown clearly enough the difference of opinion and of feeling, which
soon made the dividing line between the two great parties of the first
quarter of a century under the Constitution. Nobody then foresaw how
bitter that difference of party was to be, nor what disastrous
consequences would follow it.

Mr. Madison was among the most zealous of those who insisted upon a
discrimination against Great Britain. He thought it should be made for
the dignity no less than for the interest of the United States. He had
no fear, he said, "of entering into a commercial warfare with that
nation." England, he believed, could do this country no harm by any
peaceful reprisals she could devise. She supplied the United States with
no article either of necessity or of luxury that the people of the
United States could not manufacture for themselves. He called those
"Anglicists" who did not agree with him, and who believed that it was in
the power of Great Britain to hinder or to help immensely the prosperity
of the United States. It was not of so much moment what America bought
of England as it was that England should consent to free trade with her
colonies; and on every account it was wiser to conciliate than to defy
Great Britain; wiser to induce her to enter into a friendly commercial
alliance than to provoke her to retaliate upon the feeble commerce of
this country, upon which she had so strong a grip. Madison had shown
himself, before this time, half credulous of the charges of a leaning
toward England, and toward monarchy, made by those who wanted a congress
of petty states against those who wanted a strong national government.
If, however, there were Anglicism on one side, so there was quite as
much Gallicism, if not a good deal more, on the other. In writing to
Jefferson of the probability that the Senate would make no
discrimination in the tonnage duties, he said that in that case "Great
Britain will be quieted in the enjoyment of our trade as she may please
to regulate it, and France discouraged from her efforts at a competition
which it is not less our interest than hers to promote." Whatever may be
thought of this first concession of the new government to England, it is
quite as much the coming party leader as the statesman who speaks here.
It may not be doubted that he sincerely thought it to be, as he said,
"impolitic, in every view that can be taken of the subject, to put Great
Britain at once on the footing of the most favored nation." But the
relation of American interests to English interests was evidently
already associated in his mind with the relations of France and England,
so soon to be the absorbing question in American politics.

The impost act was followed by others hardly less important in putting
the new Constitution into operation under its first Congress. The
direction of business seems, by common consent, to have been intrusted
to Mr. Madison among the many able men of that body; doubtless because
of his thorough familiarity with the Constitution, and of his
methodical ways. He was sure to bring things forward in their due order,
to provide judiciously for the more immediate needs. The impost bill
secured the means to work with; the next necessity was to organize the
machinery to do the work. Resolutions to create the executive
departments of Foreign Affairs, of the Treasury, and of War were offered
by Mr. Madison. These were required in general terms by the
Constitution, with a single officer at the head of each, to be appointed
by the President "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate." The
manner of the appointment of subordinate officers was provided for by
the Constitution, but the manner of their removal from office was not.
Was the tenure of office to be good behavior? Were the incumbents
removable, with or without cause? If the power of removal existed, did
it vest in the power that appointed, that is, in the President and
Senate conjointly, or in the President alone?

As the Constitution was silent, the question had to be settled on its
own merits. With all the arguments that could be urged, either on one
side or the other, we are familiar enough in our time, coming up as the
question s

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