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.