GcaY
SttanDarJJ iLibrar? Coition
AMERICAN STATESMEN
EDITED BY
JOHN T. MOKSE, JR.
IN THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES
VOL. XII.
THE JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY
JAMES MADISON
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HO UGHTOlsr, MIFFLIN & CO.
amtrtcan Statesmen
JAMES MADISON
BY
SYDNEY HOWARD GAY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FODNDATIOJW
« 1951 I
Copyright, 1884,
By SYDNEY HOWARD GAY.
Copyright, 1898,
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
All rights reserved.
EDITOR'S PREFACE
Few men, so well equipped intellectually as
was Madison, have, by reason of the characteristics
of their equipment, been so dependent for success
upon the conditions amid which they have been
placed. Madison was preeminently what may be
called a cabinet statesman. He was better as a
thinker than as an actor. He had the constructive
quality, and was a master of principles of govern-
ment; but in the practical application of those
principles which he himself had formulated and
shaped, if not created, he was not fitted to excel,
unless possibly when the current of events was
running smoothly. His strength did not lie in
the executive or administrative directions. Had
he died before he was President, his fame would
not have been less than it is to-day, when he is
remembered and admired chiefly for his labors
in connection with the creation of the Constitu-
tion and the foundation of the government. He
amply deserved the honor of the presidential oifice,
though it added so little to his reputation ; but it
really meant that because he had done one task
exceedingly well, he was now appointed to do a
vi EDITOR'S PREFACE
very different task much less well. Never was a
ruler less fitted to liold the helm in troubled times,
and it was hard fortune for him to receive from
his friend and predecessor the "bequest of a war.
Probably no man could have made the conflict of
1812 a success, but Madison hardly knew how
even to try to make it so. His career was not
picturesque. I remember that Mr. Gay deplored
the difficulty which he found in his endeavors to
make his hero appear personally interesting. But
this was a secondary matter. Madison is one of
the men of whom the country has always, and
with good reason, been esj)ecially proud. It was
not alone that his character was high, but his
qualities as a statesman have been recognized as
of the first order. None of our public men has
been more useful to the country. He was in
active life for a very long time ; he was concerned
in all the important events of more than thirty
years. The story of his life is the history of the
country during all that period. Mr. Gay, in spite
of his complaint, has certainly contributed to the
series one of its most valuable volumes. He was
a writer thoroughly equipped for his task, a
scholar in American history. It seems hard that
he should not have survived to witness the now
prevalent interest in the study of that subject,
an interest which he did so much to promote,
but which was only beginning to manifest itself
EDITOR'S PREFACE vii
during his lifetime. What changes he might have
desired to make in this volume, had he survived
to this day, it is impossible to say ; but probably
he would have found little to do in this direction.
He was too thorough and conscientious a writer
to dismiss his book until he had brought it to the
best possible condition ; and no new material of
importance would now be at his disposal. His
volume may well stand in the shape in which it
came from his desk.
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
September, 1898.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
PAGK
I.
The VrRGiNiA Madisons ....
. 1
II.
The Young Statessian
15
III.
In Congress
. 28
IV.
In the State Assembly
45
V.
In the Virginia Legislature .
. 61
VI.
Public Disturbances and Anxieties .
73
vn.
The Constitutional Convention .
. 84
vni.
"The CoMPROivnsES "
94
IX.
Adoption of the Constitution
. 110
X.
The First Congress
122
XI.
National Finances — Slavery .
. 144
xn.
Federalists and Republicans ....
164
XIII.
French Politics
. 185
XIV.
His Latest Years m Congress .
207
XV.
At Home — " Resolutions of '98 and '99"
. 225
XVI.
Secretary of State
242
xvn.
The Embargo
. 254
XVIII.
Madison as President
272
XIX.
War with England
. 290
XX.
Conclusion
309
Index
. 325
ILLUSTKATIONS
James Madison Frontispiece
From the painting- by SuUy in the Corcoran GaUery of
Art, Washing-ton, D. C.
Autograph from a MS. in the New York Public Li-
brary, Lenox Building-.
The vignette of " Montpelier," Madison's home at
Montpelier, Va., is from a photograph. Pagg
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney facing 98
From the original painting by Gilbert Stuart in the pos-
session 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 j-^^^^g 162
From the miniature painted by John Trumbull in 1792,
now in the Art Gallery of Yale University.
Autograph from the Chamberlam CoUeetion, Boston
Public Library.
D01J.Y P. Madison fadng 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 MADIS0N8
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 anniver-
sary of that day, may possibly have seen a gener-
ous 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 dis-
tinguished in their deaths than in their lives —
that the " other dynasty," which John Randolj)h
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,
2 JAMES MADISON
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
Virsfinia 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 Omnipo-
tence, ascended to the bosom of his God." There
can be no doubt of the deep sincerity of this tri-
bute, whatever question there may be of its gram-
matical construction and its rhetoric, and although
the date is erroneous. The ratification of the Con-
stitution of the United States by the Virginia Con-
vention 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, how-
ever, the propriety of such providential arrange-
ments appears to have been recognized almost as
one of the " institutions." It was the newspaper
gossip of that time that a " distinguished physi-
cian " 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 fond-
ness for patriotic coincidence. But Mr. Adams's
appropriation of another anniversary answered aU
THE VIRGINIA MADISONS 3
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. Kives,
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 bur-
dened with so commonplace and homely a name
as Nelly. But we are afraid it is true that Nelly
was her name. No other biograj^her 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 be-
tween 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 sanc-
tion. The first record is, that " James Madison
was the son of James Madison and Nelly Con-
way." On such authority Nelly, and not Elea-
nor, 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
4 JAMES MADISON
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 un-
pretentious character.^ One might venture to say
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 : —
MoNTPELLiEE, February 1, 1834.
Deab 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 Con-
way. 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
THE VIRGINIA MADISONS 5
as mncli of a Northern or a Western farmer. But
they did not farm in Virginia ; they planted.
Mr. Kives says that the elder James was " a large
landed proprietor ; " and he adds, " a large landed
estate in Virginia . . . was a mimic common-
wealth, 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 imme-
diate ancestors — which seems to be all he knew
about them — that they were in " independent
and comfortable circumstances," so he was, ap-
parently, 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 : —
Elizabeth Thornton. His maternal grandmother, the danghter 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
llth, in the 98th year of her ag-e.
" His grandfathers were also planters. It appears that his an-
cestors, on both sides, were not among the most wealthy of the
country, but in independent and comfortable circumstances."
6 JAMES MADISON
MoNTPELiiiER, August 9, 1833.
Dear Sir, — Since your letter of the 3d of June
came to hand, my increasing age and continued mala-
dies, with the many attentions due from me, had caused
a delay in acknowledging it, for which these circum-
stances 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 in-
formation 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 bio-
graphical 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 elec-
tioneering 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 Chesa-
THE VIRGINIA MADISONS 7
peake Bay. The same writer further assumes that
this John was descended from Captain Isaac Madi-
son, whose name appears " in a document in the
State Paper Office at London containing a list of
the Colonists in 1623." From Sainsbury's Calen-
dar ^ 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 ap-
pears 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 be-
fore the governor and council, and disavowed the
former contract," and the case therefore became so
complicated that the court was " not able to decide
1 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574-1660, Pre-
served in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public
Record Ofi&ce, edited by W. Noel Sainsbury, Esq., etc. London,
1860.
8 JAMES MADISON
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 Vir-
ginia 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 wit-
ness 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 numer-
THE VIRGINIA MADISONS 9
ation 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 Vir-
ginia, and the name of the ship that each came in,
are all carefully given. The conclusion is inevita-
ble : 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 worth-
less. 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 sup-
posing 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 comforta-
ble 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 hun-
dred years ago the Arcadian Virginia, for which
10 JAMES MADISON
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 Madi-
son 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 Robert-
son, and that many years afterward, when his son
was an applicant for office to Madison, then sec-
retary of state, the i3upil 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, Vir-
ginia."
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, per-
haps 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 Vir-
ginia. 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 anti-
cipated manhood, we now see launched on that
THE VIRGINIA MADISONS 11
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 ex-
pect 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;
12 JAMES MADISON
but, he adds, " I doubt not but you design to sea-
son 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 pre-
cious 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 wit-
nesses and champions for and against, from the
fathers and schoolmen down to the infidel philo-
sophers 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 intol-
erance 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 la-
bors and influence. Even in 1774, when all the
colonies were girding themselves for the coming
THE VIRGINIA MADISONS 13
revolutionary conflict, he turned aside from a dis-
cussion of the momentous question of the hour, in
a letter to his friend ^ in Philadelphia, and ex-
claimed with unwonted heat : —
" But away with politics ! . . . That diaboHcal, 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 ortho-
dox. 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 lit-
tle purpose that I am without common patience."
These are stronger terms than the mild-tem-