James Madison

But Mr. Madison believed, at least, that he believed in them. There is in politics as in religion an accepted doctrine of justification by faith; and this, perhaps, sustained him when, twelve years later, as Jefferson's secretary of state, he learned from his chief that, as "Federalists seldom died and never resigned," party necessities must find a way of supplementing the law of nature. Jefferson was a little timid in applying the remedy, but Madison lived long enough to see Jackson boldly remove, in the course of his administration, about two thousand office-holders, whose places he wanted as rewards for his own political followers. From that time to this, there has not been a President who might not, if Madison's doctrine was sound, have been impeached for a "wanton" abuse of power.

Though the Constitution had been adopted by the States, it was not without objections by some of them. To meet these objections Mr. Madison proposed twelve amendments declaratory of certain fundamental popular rights, which, it was thought by many persons, were not sufficiently guarded by the original articles. This, also, was left to him to do, no doubt because of his thorough knowledge of the Constitution and of the points wherein it was still imperfect, as well as those wherein it had better not be meddled with. The amendments, as finally agreed to after long debate, were essentially those which he proposed, and in due time ten of them were ratified by the States. The two that were not accepted referred only to the number of representatives in the House, and to the pay of members of Congress.

It was hoped that the selection of a place for the permanent seat of government would be made by this Congress. There was much talk of the centres of wealth, of territory, and of population then, and of where such centres might be in the future. But the question was really a sectional one. The Northern members were accused of having made a bargain out of doors with the members of the Middle States. The bargain, however, was only this: that, inasmuch as it was hopeless that the actual centre should be chosen as the site for a capital city, a place as near as possible to it should be insisted upon. The South, on the other hand, determined that the seat of government should be within the boundaries of the Southern States. That was a foregone conclusion with them, that needed no bargain. The nearest navigable river to the centre of population was the Delaware; but the jealousy of New York stood in the way of any selection that favored Philadelphia. The Susquehanna was proposed. It empties into Chesapeake Bay. North of it was, as Mr. Sherman showed, a population of 1,400,000; and south of it, 1,200,000. The South wanted the capital on the Potomac, not because it was the centre of population then, but because it might be at some future time, from the growth of the West. On the other hand, it was insisted that the population south of the Potomac was then only 960,000, while north of it there were 1,680,000 people, and that it was no more accessible from the West than the Susquehanna was. To many members, moreover, this talk of the great future of the West seemed hardly worthy of consideration. It was "an unmeasurable wilderness," and "when it would be settled was past calculation," Fisher Ames said. "It was," he added, "perfectly romantic to make this decision depend upon that circumstance. Probably it will be near a century before these people will be considerable." He was nearer right when he said in the same speech "that trade and manufactures will accumulate people in the Eastern States in proportion of five to three, compared with the Southern. The disproportion will, doubtless, continue to be much greater than I have calculated. It is actually greater at present, for the climate and negro slavery are acknowledged to be unfavorable to population, so that husbandry as well as commerce and manufactures will give more people in the Eastern than in the Southern States." It was, however, finally resolved by the House "that the permanent seat of the government of the United States ought to be at some convenient place on the banks of the river Susquehanna in the State of Pennsylvania;" and a bill accordingly was sent to the Senate.

Had the Senate agreed to this bill, there are some luminous pages of American history that would never have been written; for the progress of events would have taken quite another direction had the influences surrounding the national capital for the first half of this century been Northern instead of Southern. But the Senate did not agree. For "the convenient place on the banks of the Susquehanna" it substituted ten miles square on the river Delaware, beginning one mile from Philadelphia and including the village of Germantown. To this amendment the House agreed, and there, but for Madison, the matter would have ended. He had labored earnestly for the site on the Potomac; but failing in that, he hoped to postpone the question till the next session of Congress, when the representatives from North Carolina would be present. He moved a proviso that the laws of Pennsylvania should remain in force within the district ceded by the State till Congress should otherwise provide by law. It seems to have been accepted without consideration, a single member only saying that he saw no necessity for it. At any rate, whether that was Mr. Madison's motive or not, time was gained, for it compelled the return of the bill to the Senate. This was on September 28, and the next day the session was closed by adjournment till the following January.

When in that next session the bill came back from the Senate to the House, a member from South Carolina said, in the course of debate, that "a Quaker State was a bad neighborhood for the South Carolinians." The Senate had also come to that conclusion, for the bill now proposed that the capital should be at Philadelphia for ten years only, and should then be removed to the banks of the Potomac. It was done, Madison wrote to Monroe, by a single vote, for two Southern senators voted against it. But the two senators from North Carolina were now present, and the majority of one was made sure of somehow.

So much was gained by gaining time, and Madison thought the passage of the bill through the House was possible, "but attended with great difficulties." Did he know how these difficulties were to be overcome? "If the Potomac succeeds," he adds, "it will have resulted from a fortuitous coincidence of circumstances which might never happen again." What the "fortuitous coincidence" was he does not explain; but the term was a felicitous euphuism to cover up what in the blunter political language of our time is called "log-rolling."

The reader of this series of biographies is already familiar with Hamilton's skillful barter of votes for the Potomac site of the capital in exchange for votes in favor of his scheme for the assumption of the state debts. Madison seems not to have been ignorant of the progress of that bargain, with which Jefferson was afterward so anxious to prove that he had nothing to do. Madison earnestly opposed the assumption of the state debts from first to last; but, when he saw that the measure was sure to pass the House, he wrote to Monroe: "I cannot deny that the crisis demands a spirit of accommodation to a certain extent. If the measure should be adopted, I shall wish it to be considered as an unavoidable evil, and possibly not the worst side of the dilemma." In other words, he was willing to assent silently to what he believed to be a great injustice to several of the States, provided that the bargain should be a gain to his own State. If Hamilton and Jefferson were sinners in this business, Madison will hardly pass for a saint.

CHAPTER XI

So far as Hamilton's funding scheme provided for that portion of the debt due to foreigners, it was accepted without demur. There could be no doubt that there the ostensible creditor was the real creditor, who should be paid in full. The report assumed that this was equally true of the domestic debt. A citizen holding a certificate of the indebtedness of the government, no matter how he came by it, nor at what price, was entitled to payment at its face value. But here the question was raised, Was this ostensible creditor the sole creditor? Was he, whose necessities had compelled him to part with the government's note of hand at a large discount when full payment was impossible, to receive nothing now when at last government was able to pay in full? Was it equity to let all the loss fall upon the original creditor, and all the gain go to him who had lost nothing originally, and had only assumed at small cost the risk of a profitable speculation? Moreover it was charged, and not denied, that in some of these speculations there had been no risk whatever; and that, so soon as the tenor of the report was known, fast-sailing vessels were dispatched from New York to the Carolinas and Georgia to buy up public securities held by persons ignorant of their recent rapid rise in value. As hitherto they had been worth only about fifteen cents on the dollar; as upon the publication of the secretary's report they had risen to fifty cents on the dollar; and as, if the secretary's advice should be taken, they would rise to a hundred cents on the dollar,—it would be securing what in the slang of the modern stock exchange is called "a good thing" to send agents into the rural districts in advance of the news to buy up government paper. "My soul rises indignant," exclaimed a member, "at the avaricious and moral turpitude which so vile a conduct displays." Nor on that point did anybody venture then to disagree with him openly.

But, besides the question as to who were in reality the public creditors, a doubt was also raised whether the debt ought to be paid in full to anybody. Every dollar of the foreign debt was for an actual dollar borrowed. But the domestic debt was not incurred to any large amount for money borrowed, but in payment for services, or for provisions and goods purchased, for which double, or more than double, prices had been exacted by those who exchanged them for government paper. If the exigencies of war had compelled the government to promise to pay for fifty bushels of wheat the price of a hundred bushels, the creditor, now that the government was in a condition to redeem its promise, was not entitled in equity to receive more than the actual value of the fifty bushels at the time of the purchase. Moreover, it was contended, there was no injustice in such a settlement of the debt, for the war had been carried on and brought to a successful end, for the benefit of the creditor as well as of everybody else. The argument was analogous in a measure to that used by a certain class of politicians in our time, who maintained that the bonds of the United States, bought at a discount for "greenbacks" during the late rebellion, should not be redeemed in gold when the war was over.

The answer to all this was obvious. The nation must first be just by paying its debts to those who could present the evidence that they were its creditors. If, when that was done, it could afford to be generous, it might, if so disposed, reimburse those who had lost by parting with the certificates of debt at a discount. The government could not in honor go behind its own contracts. The Constitution provided that "all debts and engagements, entered into before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution as under the Confederation." Here was a debt which the Confederation had contracted, and the federal government had no more right "to impair the obligation of contracts" for its own benefit than the separate States had; and that they were expressly forbidden by the Constitution to do.

Madison listened quietly day after day to the long and earnest debates upon the subject, and then advanced an entirely new proposition. He agreed with one party in maintaining the inviolability of contracts. The Confederacy had incurred a debt to its own citizens which the new government had agreed to assume. But he also agreed with the other party that there was a question as to whom that debt was due. Were those who now held the certificates entitled to the payment of their face value, dollar for dollar, although the cost to them was only somewhere from fifteen to fifty cents on the dollar? It was true that the original contract was transferable, and these present creditors held the evidence of the transfer. But did that transfer entitle the holder to the full value without regard to the price paid for it? Was there not in equity a reserved right in the original holder, who, having given a full equivalent for the debt, had only parted with the evidence of it, under the compulsion of his own poverty, and the inability of the government at that time to meet its obligations? Was not this specially true in the case of the soldiers of the late war, to whose devotion and sacrifices the nation owed its existence?

Mr. Madison thought that an affirmative reply to the last two queries would present the true view of the case, and he proposed, therefore, to pay both classes of creditors,—those who now held the evidence of indebtedness, acquired by purchase at no matter what price; and those who had parted with that evidence without receiving the amount which the government had promised to pay for services rendered. It was not, however, to be expected that the entire debt should be paid in full to both classes. That was beyond the ability of the government. But it would be an equitable settlement, he contended, to pay the present holders the highest price the certificates had ever reached, and to award the remainder to those who were the original creditors.

This proposition received only thirteen votes out of forty-nine. Many of those opposed to it were quite ready to grant that it was hard upon the veterans of the war that they, who had received so little and who had borne so much, should not now be recognized as creditors when at last the government was able to pay its debts. But the House could not indulge in sentimental legislation. That would be to launch the ship of state upon another sea of bankruptcy. There were in the hands of the people tens of millions of paper money not worth at the current rate a cent on the dollar. If everybody who had lost was to be paid, the point would soon be reached where nobody would be paid at all. A limit must be fixed somewhere; let it be at these certificates of debt which were the evidence of a contract made between the government and its creditors. These could be paid, and they should be paid, to those who were in lawful possession of them. The law, if not the equity, of the case was clearly against Madison. That the government should be absolutely just to everybody who had ever trusted to it, and lost by it, was impossible. It was a bankrupt compelled to name its preferred creditors, and it named those whom it was in honor and law bound to take care of, and over whose claims there was, on the whole, the least shadow of doubt. That the loss should remain chiefly with the soldiers of the Revolution, and the gain fall chiefly to those who were shrewd enough, or had the means to speculate in the public funds, was a lamentable fact; but to discriminate between them was not within the right of the government. That he would have had it discriminate was creditable to Madison's heart; it was rather less creditable to his head.

Of course, underneath all this debate there lay other considerations than those merely of debtor and creditor, of moral and legal obligation, of pity for the soldiers, and of strict regard for the letter of a contract. Mr. Hamilton and his friends, it was said, were anxious to establish the public credit, not so much because they wished to keep faith with creditors as because they wished to strengthen the government and build up their own party. The reply to these accusations was, that the other side, under pretense of consideration for the soldiers and others on whom the burden of the war had borne most heavily, concealed hostility to the Constitution and a consolidated government. These were not reflections to be spoken of in debate, but they were not the less cherished, and gave to it piquancy and spirit. There was truth on both sides without doubt.

Though defeated in this measure, Madison was not less determined in his opposition to the assumption of the debts of the States. Of these debts some States had discharged more than others; and he complained, not without reason, of the injustice of compelling those which had borne their own burdens unaided to share in the obligations which others had neglected. He was unfortunate, however, in assuming a superiority for Virginia over some of the Eastern States, and especially over Massachusetts, in services rendered in the struggle for independence. The comparison provoked a call for official inquiry; and that proved that Massachusetts alone had sent more men into the field during the war than all the Southern States together. It was not much to be wondered at, when this fact was considered, that the debt of Massachusetts should be larger than that of Virginia by $800,000. The difference between Virginia and South Carolina was the same, the truth being that the war had cost Massachusetts more money to pay her soldiers for the general service, and South Carolina more to repel the enemy upon her own soil, than it had cost Virginia for either purpose. Massachusetts and South Carolina were again found acting together, simply because each of them had a debt—$4,000,000—larger than that of any other State. The total debt of all the States was about $21,000,000; and as that of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut, when added to the $8,000,000 of Massachusetts and South Carolina, amounted to half, or more, of the whole sum, there was no difficulty in forming a strong combination in favor of assumption. No combination, however, was strong enough to carry the measure on its own merits, notwithstanding its advocates attempted to defeat the funding of the domestic debt of the Federal Union unless the debts of the several States were assumed at the same time.

The domestic debt, however, was at length provided for, and the assumption of the debts of the States was rejected till that bargain, referred to in the preceding chapter, which gave to the Southern States the permanent seat of government, was concluded. It would not have been difficult, probably, to defeat that piece of political jobbery by a public exposure of its terms. Why Madison did not resort to it, if, as seems certain, he knew that such a bargain had been privately made, can only be conjectured. Perhaps he saw that Hamilton, who was applauded by his friends and denounced by his enemies for his clever management, had, after all, only made a temporary gain; and that Jefferson, whose defense was that Hamilton had taken advantage of his ignorance and innocence, would not, had he not been short-sighted, have made any defense at all. For the assumption of the state debts by the general government was only a distribution of a single local burden; and this was a small price for Virginia and the other Southern States to pay for the permanent possession of the federal capital.

While these questions were pending, another was thrown into the House which was not disposed of for nearly two months. The debates upon it, Madison said in one of his letters, "were shamefully indecent," though he thought the introduction of the subject into Congress injudicious. The Yearly Meeting of Friends in New York and in Pennsylvania sent a memorial against the continued toleration of the slave trade; and this was followed the next day by a petition from the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery, signed by Benjamin Franklin as president, asking for a more radical measure.

The words were probably Franklin's own, and, as he died a few weeks after they were written, they may be considered as his dying words to his countrymen,—counsel wise and merciful as his always was.

A memorable debate followed the presentation of these memorials. Even in the imperfect report of it that has come down to us, the "shameful indecency" of which Madison speaks is visible enough. Franklin, venerable in years, exalted in character, and eminent above almost all the men of the time for services to his country, was sneered at for senility and denounced as disregarding the obligations of the Constitution. But the wrath of the pro-slavery extremists was specially aroused against the Society of Friends, and was unrestrained by any considerations of either decency or truth. In this respect the debate was the precursor of every contest in Congress upon the subject that was to follow for the coming seventy years. The Quakers were the representative abolitionists of that day, and the measure of bitter and angry denunciation that was meted out to them was the same measure which, heaped up and overflowing, was poured out upon those who, in later times, took upon themselves the burden of the cause of the slave. The line of argument, the appeals to prejudice, the disregard of facts and the false conclusions, the misrepresentation of past history and the misapprehension of the future, the contempt of reason, of common sense, and common humanity, then laboriously and unscrupulously arrayed in defense of slavery, left nothing for the exercise of the ingenuity of modern orators. A single difference only between the earlier and the later time is conspicuous; the "plantation manners," as they were called five and twenty years ago, which the Wises, the Brookses, the Barksdales, and the Priors of the modern South relied upon as potent weapons of defense and assault, were unknown in the earlier Congresses.

Mr. Madison and some other members from the South, particularly those from Virginia, opposed the majority of their colleagues, who were unwilling that these memorials should be referred to a committee. "The true policy of the Southern members," Madison wrote to a friend, "was to have let the affair proceed with as little noise as possible, and to have made use of the occasion to obtain, along with an assertion of the powers of Congress, a recognition of the restraints imposed by the Constitution." This in effect was done in the end, but not till near two months had passed, within which time the more violent of the Southern members had ample opportunity to free their minds and exhaust the subject. The more these people talked the worse it was, of course, for their cause. Had Madison's moderate advice been accepted then, and had that example been followed for the next sixty or seventy years, it is quite likely that the colored race would still be in bondage in at least one half of the States. But there was never a more notable example of manifest destiny than the gradual but certain progress of the opposition to slavery; for there never was a system, any attempt to defend which showed how utterly indefensible such a system must needs be. Every argument advanced in its favor was so manifestly absurd, or so shocking to the ordinary sense of mankind, that the more it was discussed the more widespread and earnest became the opposition. Had the slaveholders been wise, they would never have opened their mouths upon the subject. But, like the man possessed of the devil, they never ceased to cry, "Let me alone!" And the more they cried, the more there were who understood where that cry came from.

In one respect Mr. Madison declared that the memorial of the Friends demanded attention. If the American flag was used to protect foreigners in carrying on the slave trade in other countries, that was a proper subject for the consideration of Congress. "If this is the case," he said, "is there any person of humanity that would not wish to prevent them?"[13] But he recognized the limitations of the Constitution in relation to the importation of slaves into the United States, and the want of any authority in the letter of the Constitution, or of any wish on the part of Congress, to interfere with slavery in the States. On these points he would have a decisive declaration, without agitation, and with as little discussion as possible, and there would have dropped the subject. It only needed, he evidently thought, that everybody, North and South, should understand the Constitution to be a mutual agreement to let slavery altogether alone, when the bargain would be on both sides faithfully adhered to.

This was all very well with the numerous persons who were quite indifferent to the subject, or who thought it very unreasonable in the blacks not to be quite willing to remain slaves a few hundred years longer. But there were two other classes to reckon with, and Mr. Madison was not much inclined to be patient with either of them. To let the subject alone was precisely what the hot-headed members from the South were incapable of doing then, as they proved to be incapable of doing for the next seventy years. On the other hand, all the petitioners could really hope for was that there should be discussion. The galleries were crowded at those earliest debates, as they continued to be crowded on all such occasions in subsequent years. Many went to learn what could be said on behalf of slavery, who came away convinced that the least said the better. Agitation might disturb the harmony of the Union, which was Madison's dread; it might lead to the death of an abolitionist, as it sometimes did in later times; but it was sure in the end to be the death of slavery, though its short-sighted defenders could never understand why. They could never be made to see that its most dangerous foes were the friends of its own household, who could not hold their tongues; that for their case all wisdom was epitomized in the vulgar caution "to lie low and keep dark;" that the exposure of the true character of slavery must needs be its destruction, and that nothing so exposed it as any attempt to defend it. Slavery was quite safe under the Constitution, as Mr. Madison intimated, if its friends would only leave it there and claim no other protection.

Advocates are never wanting in any court who believe that the most effective line of defense is to abuse the plaintiff. The Quakers, it was said, "notwithstanding their outward pretenses," had no "more virtue or religion than other people, nor perhaps so much." They had not made the Constitution, nor risked their lives and fortunes by fighting for their country. Why should they "set themselves up in such a particular manner against slavery"? Did they not know that the Bible not only allowed but commended it, "from Genesis to Revelation"? That the Saviour had permitted it? That the Apostles, in spreading Christianity, had never preached against it? That it had been—the illustration was not altogether a happy one—"no novel doctrine since the days of Cain"? The condition of these American slaves was said to be one of great happiness and comfort; yet almost in the same breath it was asserted that to excite in their minds any hope of change would lead to the most disastrous consequences, and possibly to massacre. The memorialists were bidden to remember that, even if slavery "were an evil, it was one for which there was no remedy;" for that reason the North had acquiesced in it; "a compromise was made on both sides,—we took each other, with our mutual bad habits and respective evils, for better, for worse; the Northern States adopted us with our slaves, and we adopted them with their Quakers." Without such a compromise there could have been no Union, and any interference now with slavery by the government would end in a civil war. These people were meddling with what was none of their business, and exciting the slaves to insurrection. Yet how forbearing were the people of the Southern States who, notwithstanding all this, "had not required the assistance of Congress to exterminate the Quakers!"

This was not conciliatory. Those who had been disposed at the beginning to meet the petitions with a quiet reply that the subject was out of the jurisdiction of Congress were now provoked to give them a much warmer reception. They could not listen patiently to the abuse of the Quakers, and, though they might acquiesce in the toleration of slavery, they were not inclined to have it crammed down their throats as a wise, beneficent, and consistent condition of society under a republican government. Even Madison, who at first was most anxious that nothing should be said or done to arouse agitation, while acknowledging that all citizens might rightfully appeal to Congress for a redress of what they considered grievances, was moved at last to say that the memorial of the Friends was "well worthy of consideration." While admitting that under the Constitution the slave trade could not be prohibited for twenty years, "yet," he declared, "there are a variety of ways by which it [Congress] could countenance the abolition, and regulations might be made in relation to the introduction of [slavery] into the new States to be formed out of the western territory."

Gerry was still more emphatic in the assertion of the right of interference. He boldly asserted that "flagrant acts of cruelty" were committed in carrying on the African slave trade; and, while nobody proposed to violate the Constitution, "that we have a right to regulate this business is as clear as that we have any right whatever; nor has the contrary been shown by anybody who has spoken on the occasion." Nor did he stop there. He told the slaveholders that the value of their slaves in money was only about ten million dollars, and that Congress had the right to propose "to purchase the whole of them; and their resources in the western territory might furnish them with the means." The Southern members would, perhaps, have been startled by such a proposition as this, had he not immediately added that "he did not intend to suggest a measure of this kind; he only instanced these particulars to show that Congress certainly had a right to intermeddle in the business." It is quite likely, had he pushed such a measure with his well-known zeal and determination, that it would have been at least received with a good deal of favor; and, as the admirers of Jefferson are tenacious of his fame as the author of the original Northwest Ordinance, so Gerry, had he seriously and earnestly urged the policy of using the proceeds of the sales of territorial lands to remunerate the owners of slaves for their liberation, would have left behind him a more fragrant memory than that which clings to him as a minister to France, and as the "Gerrymandering" governor of Massachusetts. The debate, however, came to an end at last with no other result than that which would have been reached at the beginning without debate, except, perhaps, that the vote in favor of the reports upon the memorials was smaller than it might have been had there been no discussion.

Within less than two years, however, Warner Mifflin of Delaware, an eminent member of the Society of Friends, who was one of the first, if not the first, of that society to manumit his own slaves, petitioned Congress to take some measure for general emancipation. The petition was entered upon the journal; but on a subsequent day a North Carolina member, Mr. Steele, said that, "after what had passed at New York on this subject, he had hoped the House would have heard no more of it;" and he moved that the petition be returned to Mifflin and be expunged from the journal. Fisher Ames explained in a rather apologetic tone that he had presented the petition at Mr. Mifflin's request, because the member from Delaware was absent, and because he believed in the right of petition, though "he considered it as totally inexpedient to interfere with the subject." The House agreed that the petition should be returned, and Steele then withdrew the motion to expunge it from the journal.

In the next Congress, eighteen months afterward, the House took up the subject of the slave trade, apparently of its own motion, and a bill was passed prohibiting the carrying on of that traffic from the ports of the United States in foreign vessels. The question was as inexorable as death, and the difference in regard to it then was precisely what it was in the final discussion of the next century which settled it forever. One set of men was given over to perdition if they dared so much as talk; the other set talked all the more, and went to the very verge of the Constitution in act all the more, because they were bidden neither to speak nor to move. Courage was not one of Madison's marked characteristics, but he never showed more of it than in his hostility to slavery.

At the third session of the First Congress, which had adjourned from New York to Philadelphia, where it met in December, 1790, Madison led his party in opposition to the establishment of a national bank, which Hamilton had recommended; and again, as in the adjustment of the domestic debt, he and his party were defeated. He compared the advantages and the disadvantages of banks, and possibly he did not satisfy himself, as he certainly did not the other side, that the weight of the argument was against their utility. At any rate, he fell back upon the Constitution as his strongest position. To incorporate a bank was not, he maintained, among the powers conferred upon Congress. The Federalists, who were beginning to recognize him as the leader of the opposition, were quite ready to accept that challenge. "Little doubt remains," said Fisher Ames in rising to reply, "with respect to the utility of banks." Assuming that to be settled,—whether he meant, or not, that such was the conclusion to be drawn from Madison's argument on that point,—he addressed himself to the constitutional question. If the incorporation of a bank was forbidden by the Constitution, there was an end of the matter. If it was not forbidden, but if Congress may exercise powers not expressly bestowed upon it, and if by a bank some of the things which the federal government had to do could be best done, it would be not only right but wise to establish such an agency. This was the burden of the argument of the Federalists, and Madison and his friends had no sufficient answer. The bill was at length passed by a vote of thirty-nine to twenty.

But it had still to pass the ordeal of the cabinet. The President was not disposed to rely upon his own judgment either one way or the other. He asked, therefore, for the written opinions of the secretaries of the treasury and of state, Hamilton and Jefferson, and the attorney-general, Randolph. The same request was made to Madison, probably more because Washington held his ability and knowledge of constitutional law in high esteem than because of the prominent part he had taken in the debate. Hamilton's argument in favor of the bill was an answer to the papers of the three other gentlemen, and was accepted as conclusive by the President.

CHAPTER XII

In the course of the three sessions of the First Congress the line was distinctly drawn between the Federal and Republican (or Democratic) parties. The Federalists, it was evident, had succeeded in firmly uniting thirteen separate States into one great nation, or into what, in due time, was sure to become a great nation. It was no longer a loose assemblage of thirteen independent bodies, revolving, indeed, around a central power, but with a centrifugal motion that might at any time send them flying off into space, or destroy them by collisions at various tangents. Those who opposed the Federalists, however, had no fear of a tendency to tangents; the danger was, as they believed, of too much centripetal forces and that the circling planets might fall into the central sun and disappear altogether. Even if there were no flying off into space, and no falling into the sun, they had no faith in this sort of political astronomy. They were unwilling to float in fixed orbits obedient to a supreme law other than their own.

There is no need to doubt the honesty of either party then, whatever came to pass in later years. Nor, however, is there any more doubt now which was the wiser. Before the end of the century the administration of government was wrested from the hands of those who had created the Union; and within fifteen years more the Federal party, under that name, had disappeared. It would not be quite just to say that they were opposed for no better reason than because they were in power. But it is quite true that the principles and the policy of the Federalists survived the party organization; and they not only survived, but, so far as the opposite party was ever of service to the country, it was when that party adopted the federal measures. It was in accordance with the early principles of Federalism that the republic was defended and saved in the war of 1860-65; as it was the principles of the Democratic state-rights party, administered by a slaveholding oligarchy, that made that war inevitable.

Hamilton said, in the well-known Carrington letter in the spring of 1792, that he was thoroughly convinced by Madison's course in the late Congress that he, "coöperating with Mr. Jefferson, is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration, and actuated by views, in my judgment, subversive of the principles of good government, and dangerous to the union, peace, and happiness of the country." At first he was disposed to believe, because of his "previous impressions of the fairness of Mr. Madison's character," that there was nothing personal or factious in this hostility. But he soon changed his mind. Up to the time of the meeting of the First Congress there had always been perfect accord between them, and Hamilton accepted his seat in the cabinet "under the full persuasion," he said, "that from similarity of thinking, conspiring with personal good-will, I should have the firm support of Mr. Madison in the general course of my administration." But when he found in Madison his most determined opponent, either open or covert, in the most important measures he urged upon Congress,—the settlement of the domestic debt, the assumption of the debts of the States, and the establishment of a national bank,—he was compelled to seek for other than public motives for this opposition. "It had been," he declared, "more uniform and persevering than I have been able to resolve into a sincere difference of opinion. I cannot persuade myself that Mr. Madison and I, whose politics had formerly so much the same point of departure, should now diverge so widely in our opinions of the measures which are proper to be pursued."

In the letter from which these extracts are made Jefferson and Madison are painted as almost equally black, though the color was laid the thicker on Jefferson, if there was any difference. Hamilton seemed to think that, if Jefferson was the more malicious, Madison was the more artful. He is accused of an attempt to get the better of the secretary of the treasury by a trick which was dishonorable in itself, and at the same time an abuse of the confidence reposed in him by Washington. Before sending in his message at the opening of the Second Congress the President submitted it to Madison, who, Hamilton declares, so altered it, by transposing a passage and by the addition of a few words, that the President was made to seem, unconsciously to himself, to approve of Jefferson's proposal to establish the same unit for coins as for weights. This would have been to disapprove of the proposal of the secretary of the treasury that the dollar should remain the unit of coinage. The statement rests on Hamilton's assertion; and as he had forgotten the words which made the change he complained of, and as the message was restored to its original form by the President when its possible interpretation was pointed out to him, it is impossible now to judge whether Madison may not have been quite innocent of the intention imputed to him. It is plain enough, however, that Hamilton was sore and disappointed at Madison's conduct, and that he was quick to seize upon any incident that justified him in saying, "The opinion I once entertained of the candor and simplicity and fairness of Mr. Madison's character has, I acknowledge, given way to a decided opinion that it is one of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind." To justify this opinion, and as an evidence of how bitter Madison's political and personal enmity toward him had become, he refers in the same letter to Madison's relation to Freneau and his paper, "The National Gazette." "As the coadjutor of Jefferson," he wrote, "in the establishment of this paper, I include Mr. Madison in the consequences imputable to it."

The story of Freneau need not be repeated here at length, having been already told in another volume of this series of biographies. If there were anything in that affair, however, for which Jefferson could be fairly called to account, Madison may be held as not less responsible. When the charge was made that he had a sinister motive in procuring for Freneau a clerkship in the State Department, and in aiding him to establish a newspaper, Madison frankly related the facts in a letter to Edmund Randolph. He had nothing to deny except to repel with some indignation the charge that he had helped to establish the journal in order that it might "sap the Constitution," or that there was the slightest expectation or intention on his part of any relation between the State Department and the newspaper. Freneau was one of his college friends, a deserving man, to whom he was attached, and whom he was glad to help. There was nothing improper in commending one well qualified to discharge its duties for the post of translator in a government office; and as those duties, for which the yearly salary was only two hundred and fifty dollars, were light, there was no good reason why the clerk should not find other employment for leisure hours.

If Mr. Madison, having said this, had stopped there, his critics would have been silenced. But when he added that he advised his friend with another motive besides that of helping him to start a newspaper, then, as the expressive modern phrase is, he "gave himself away." There is a feeling, common even in those early and innocent days when such things were rare, that the editor, whose daily bread, whether it be cake or crust, comes from the bounty of the man in office or other place of power,—that an editor so fed, and perhaps fattened, is only a servant bought at a price. Madison said that to help a needy man whom he held in high esteem was his "primary and governing motive." But he adds: "That, as a consequential one, I entertained hopes that a free paper ... would be an antidote to the doctrines and discourses circulated in favor of monarchy and aristocracy; would be an acceptable vehicle of public information in many places not sufficiently supplied with it,—this also is a certain truth." What was this but an acknowledgment of the essential truth of the charge brought against Jefferson and himself? Not that he might not devoutly hope for an antidote to the poisonous doctrines of monarchy and aristocracy, though in very truth the existence of any such poison was only one of the maggots which, bred in the muck of party strife, had found a lodgment in his brain; not that it was not a commendable public spirit to wish for a good newspaper to circulate where it was most needed; not that it was not a most excellent thing in him to hold out a helping hand to the friend who had been less fortunate than himself,—but that, in helping his friend to a clerkship in a department of the government, his motive was in part that the possession of a public office would enable the man to establish a party organ. That was precisely the point of the charge which he seems to have failed to apprehend,—that public patronage was used at his suggestion to further party ends.

Freneau had intended to start a newspaper somewhere in New Jersey. Whether or not that known intention suggested that the project could be better carried out in Philadelphia, and a clerkship in the State Department would be an aid to it, the change of plan was adopted and the clerkship bestowed upon him. The paper—the first number of which appeared five days after his appointment—was, as it was known that it would be, an earnest defender of Jefferson and his friends, and a formidable opponent of Hamilton and his party. The logical conclusion was that the man, being put in place for a purpose, was diligent in using the opportunities the place afforded him to fulfill the hopes of those to whom he was indebted. Madison and Jefferson both denied, with much heat and indignation, that they had anything to do with the editorial conduct of the paper. No doubt they spoke the truth. They had to draw the line somewhere; they drew it there; and an exceedingly sharp and fine line it was. For it is plain that Freneau knew very well what he was about and what was expected of him, and his powerful friends knew very well that he knew it. They could feel in him the most implicit confidence as an untamed and untamable democrat, and one, perhaps, whose gratitude would be kept alive by the remembrance of poverty and the hope of future favors. There was clearly no need of a board of directors for the editorial supervision of "The National Gazette," and it was quite safe to deny that any existed. The fact, nevertheless, remained that a seat had been given the editor at Mr. Jefferson's elbow.

Three months before Madison heard that his relation to Freneau was bringing him under public censure, he showed an evident interest in the "Gazette" hardly consistent with his subsequent avowal of having nothing to do with its management. In a letter to Jefferson he refers to the postage on newspapers established by the bill for the regulation of post-offices, and fears that it will prove a grievance in the loss of subscribers. He suggests that a notice be given that the papers "will not be put into the mail, but sent as heretofore," meaning by that, probably, that they would be sent under the franks of members of Congress, or by any other chance that might offer. "Will you," he adds, "hint this to Freneau? His subscribers in this quarter seem pretty well satisfied with the degree of regularity and safety with which they get the papers, and highly pleased with the paper itself." This was careful dry-nursing for the bantling which had been provided with so comfortable a cradle in the State Department.

The political casuist of our time may wonder at the importance which attached to this Freneau affair. We are taught that "there were giants in those days," but we may also remember that in the modern science of "practical politics" they were as babes and sucklings. Madison was making good his place as a leader of the opposition hardly second to Jefferson himself. As with Hamilton, so with the Federalists generally, he fell more even than Jefferson fell in their esteem. He fell more, because he had farther to fall. No man had been more earnest than he for a consolidated government; no one had shown more activity to bring about a convention to frame a federal Constitution; and when at last that work was done, no one, not even Hamilton himself, was more zealous to convince his countrymen that national salvation depended upon union, and that union was hopeless unless the Constitution should be adopted. The disappointment and the shock were all the greater when he gradually drew off from those who had hitherto counted him as on their side. They could not understand how he could find so much to oppose in the legitimate administration—as they believed it to be—of a Constitution he had done so much to create, and the beneficent results of which he had foreseen and foretold. Or, if they understood him, it was on the supposition that he had thrown his convictions and his principles to the winds, abandoned his old friends and attached himself to new ones, from motives of personal ambition. This, of course, may not have been absolutely just. It is quite possible that he did not deliberately surrender his principles, but persuaded himself that he was as true as ever to the Constitution. It is, nevertheless, certainly true that the men with whom he was now acting were the men who, having failed to prevent the adoption of the Constitution, now aimed, by zealous endeavors for an assumed strict construction, to defeat the purpose for which it was framed.[14]

Naturally his motives were suspected, and his conduct narrowly watched. Jefferson's influence over him was known to be great, and Jefferson had had nothing to do with the framing of the Constitution, had been doubtful at first of its wisdom, and gave his assent to it at last with many doubts. The Anti-Federal party was growing gradually stronger in Virginia as in all the Southern States; most of Madison's warmest personal friends, as well as Jefferson, were of that party. What chance would he have in the public career he had marked out for himself if his path and theirs led in opposite directions? How much he was influenced by these considerations it is impossible to tell; perhaps he himself could not have told. Perhaps they were not even considerations, but only unconscious influences, which he would have thrown behind him had he recognized them as possible motives. To others, however, whether justly or not, they were quite sufficient to explain his course, and, once accepted, no other explanation was sought for. The appointment of Freneau to office at Madison's request, followed by the almost immediate appearance of a violent party organ, edited by this clerk in Mr. Jefferson's department, was quite enough to raise an outcry among the Federalists; and Madison's explanation, when it came to be known, of his share in that business, did not add to his reputation either for frankness or political rectitude. Perhaps it was at first more the seeming want of frankness that disgusted his old friends. They could have more readily forgiven him had he openly declared that he had gone over to the enemy, instead of professing to find in the Constitution sufficient ground for hostility to their measures. These constitutional scruples they sometimes thought so thin a disguise of other motives as to be better deserving of ridicule than of argument.

All he said and did was watched with suspicion. In the interval between the First and Second Congresses, he and Jefferson made a tour through some of the Eastern States, as they said, for relaxation and pleasure. But it was looked upon as a strategic movement. Interviews between them and Livingston and Burr in New York were reported to Hamilton as "a passionate courtship." They visited Albany, it was said, "under the pretext of a botanical excursion," but in reality to meet with Clinton. Botany naturally suggests agriculture, and as they continued on their journey into New England they were accused of "sowing tares" as they traveled. Such treachery would have been considered as aggravated by hypocrisy had it been known then that on his return Mr. Madison wrote to his father from New York: "The tour I lately made with Mr. Jefferson, of which I have given the outlines to my brother, was a very agreeable one, and carried us through interesting country, new to us both." This was cool, if the journey really was a political reconnoissance.

Though Mr. Madison may have been for a time a special target for this kind of partisan rancor, it was by no means confined to him. Jefferson had a very pretty talent for exasperating his enemies, and nobody could long divide with him the distinction of being the best hated man in the country. A curious instance of it was given when the question was discussed, both in the First and Second Congresses, as to the successor to the presidency in case the office should become vacant by the deaths of both President and Vice-President. A bill was sent down from the Senate to the House providing, in case such a thing should ever happen, that the president pro tempore of the Senate, or, should the Senate have no temporary president, the speaker of the House of Representatives, should succeed to the vacant office. The House sent back the bill with an amendment substituting the secretary of state for the succession in the possible vacancy instead of the presiding officers of the two houses of Congress. Madison was very earnest for this amendment, but the Senate rejected it, and the House finally assented to the original bill. It was shown in the course of the debate that according to the doctrine of chances the office of president would not devolve, through the accident of death, upon a third person oftener than once in about eight hundred and forty years. The rejection of the amendment naming the secretary of state as the proper person to succeed to the presidency, in the improbable event supposed, was nevertheless resented by the Republicans as a direct reflection upon Mr. Jefferson. Nor did the Federalists deny it. With grim humor they seized upon the opportunity, apparently, to announce that not with their consent should he ever be president, even by accident, though he should wait literally eight hundred and forty years. It was a long-range shot, but there could not have been one better aimed.

If before there had been some room for hope, Madison's course in the Second Congress left no doubt as to which party he had cast his lot with. His hostility to the establishment of a bank was, he thought, justified by what he saw at the opening of the subscription books in New York. The anxiety to get possession of the stock was not to him an evidence of public confidence, and an argument, therefore, in favor of such an institution, but "a mere scramble for so much public plunder." He could only see that "stock-jobbing drowns every other subject. The coffee-house is in an eternal buzz with the gamblers." "It pretty clearly appears also," he said, "in what proportions the public debt lies in the country, what sort of hands holding it, and by whom the people of the United States are to be governed." Here, perhaps, was one cause of his hostility to Hamilton's financial policy. Its immediate benefit was for that class whose pecuniary stake in the stability of the government was the largest. This class was chiefly in the Northern States, where capital was in money and was always on the lookout for safe and profitable investment. At the South, capital was in slaves and land, and could not be easily changed. If the Bank and the bondholders were to exercise—as he feared they would, and as he believed that the Federalists meant they should—a controlling influence over the government, it was certainly pretty apparent "by whom the people of the United States were to be governed." It would be the North, not the South; and he was a Virginian before he was a Unionist.

Perhaps he was influenced by this consideration when he proposed that the payment of the domestic debt should be divided between those who had originally held, and those who had acquired by purchase, the certificates of indebtedness. The public creditors would in that case have been more widely distributed in different sections of the country and among different classes. The thought, at any rate, does not seem to have been a new one when he saw and reported the eagerness with which the bank stock was sought for, denounced it as stock-jobbing and gambling, and indignantly reflected that in these men he saw the future governors of the country, and particularly of his own people. No doubt there was a good deal of speculation; and, as at all such times, there were a few who made fortunes, while many, who had at first much money and no stock, next much stock and no money, had at last neither stock nor money. But Mr. Madison's indignation was quite wasted, and his fears quite unfounded. Neither the stock-jobbers, the Bank, nor the bondholders ever usurped the government, whatever may have been Hamilton's hopes or schemes, if he had any other than to serve his country. The money-power of the North built cities and ships, factories and towns, and stretched out its hands to the great lakes and over the broad prairies, to add to its dominion, to extend its civilization, and to give to labor and industry their due reward. It was the South that devoted itself to the business of politics, and, united by stronger bonds than can ever be forged of gold alone, soon entered into possession of the government, which it retained and used for its own interests, without regard to the interests or the rights of the North, for nearly three quarters of a century. Mr. Madison had no prescience of any such future in the history of the country, nor, indeed, then had anybody else. He may have really believed that the holders of a large public debt and the owners of a great national bank, through which the monetary affairs of the country could be controlled, were aiming to lay hold of the government. If all this were true, imminent peril was impending over republican institutions. The inconsistency of which Hamilton accused Madison was therefore not necessarily a crime. It might even be a virtue, and Madison be applauded for his courage in avowing a change of opinion, if he saw in the practical application of Hamilton's principles dangers that had not occurred to him when looking at them only as abstract theories. But the Federalists believed that Madison, governed by these purely selfish motives, sacrificed his convictions of what was best for the country that he might secure for himself a position on what he foresaw was the winning side. It is quite likely that the more pronounced enmity he showed towards Hamilton during the second session of Congress was due in some measure to his knowledge of this feeling towards himself among Federalists. He seemed, at any rate, to be animated by something more than the proverbial zeal of the new convert. If it was not always shown in debate, it lurked in his letters. Anything that came from the secretary, or anything that favored the secretary's measures, was sure to be opposed by him. He was not, of course, always in the wrong, and sometimes he was very right. There was a manifest disposition on the part of the Federalists in the House to defer to the secretary in a way to provoke opposition from those who did not share in their estimate of his great ability. There was some resentment, for example, when it was proposed that Congress should submit to the secretary the question of ways and means to carry on the Indian war at the West, after St. Clair's disastrous defeat, and when, a few days later, it was suggested that he should be called upon to report a plan for the reduction of the public debt. Members, chief among them Madison, thought that they were quite capable of discharging the duties belonging to their branch of the government without instructions from a head of department whom many of them looked upon as only an official subordinate of Congress. For the same reason they refused with prompt decision to permit the secretary to appear upon the floor of the House to explain some proposed measure. In the Carrington letter Hamilton said that he had "openly declared" a "determination to treat him [Madison] as a political enemy." He probably took care that Madison should hear of it, for he was not a man who made idle threats. He was sometimes arrogant and overbearing in manner, was always ready for a fight, which he rather preferred to quietude, and had little disposition to spare an enemy. These were not conciliating qualities likely to temper the asperities of political warfare, and they may have provoked even Madison, mild-mannered and almost timid as he was, to unusual heat.

All this, of course, is aside from the question whether the party, to which Mr. Madison had given his allegiance, was right or wrong. On that point there may be an honest difference of opinion. It is apart also from the question whether a man may not honestly change sides in politics, notwithstanding the suspicion that always follows him who runs from one side to the other, when in neither has there been any change in principles or measures. It is quite possible that he may be governed by the most sincere convictions; and if he obeys them and abandons old friends for new ones, or consents to be friendless, it is the strongest proof the statesman or politician can give of a moral courage which ought to gain for him all the more respect. But whether that respect must be denied to Mr. Madison, because he was governed by other and lower motives, is the question. There had been no change of political principles either in the party he had left or the party he had joined; but each was striving with all its might to adapt the old doctrines to the altered condition of affairs under the new Union. The change was wholly in Mr. Madison. That which had been white to him was now black; that which had been black was now as the driven snow. Why was this? Had he come to see that in all those years he had been wrong? Or had he suddenly learned, not that he was wrong, but that he had mistaken a straight and narrow path for the broad road which would lead to the goal he was seeking? These are not pleasant questions. He had served his country well; one does not like to doubt whether it was with a selfish rather than a noble purpose. But of any public man who changed front as he changed, the question always will be, What moved him? Not to ask it in regard to Madison is to drop out of sight the turning-point of his career; not to consider it is to leave unheeded essential light upon one side of his character. For his own fortunes the choice he made was judicious, if to "gain the whole world" is always the wisest and best thing to do. He gained his world, and was wise and virtuous in his generation according to the vote of a large majority. Whether that decision still holds good it is not so easy to say; probably it does, however; for the popular estimate of men often remains unchanged long after the judgment upon the events which gave them celebrity is completely reversed. But history, in the long run, weighs with even scales; and the verdict on Madison's character usually comes with that pitiful recommendation to mercy from a jury loath to condemn. Admiration for his great services in the Constitutional Convention and after it, when its work was presented to the people for their approval, has never been withheld; upon his official integrity and his high sense of honor in all his personal relations, except when obligation to party may have overshadowed it, there rests no cloud; and his intellectual power is never questioned. One having these recognized qualities, and who for five and twenty years was generally high in office, must needs be held in high estimation, especially in a new country where fame, like everything else, is cheap. Nevertheless, impartial historians, who venture to believe that nature admits of imperfections in a native of Virginia, declare their conviction that Mr. Madison either wanted the strength and courage to resist the influence of those about him, or that the ambition of the politician was strong enough to overcome any consideration of principles that might stand in his way.