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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 <DW64> 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