Its crowning humiliation came with the capture of Washington in August, 1814, when the British admiral, Cockburn, entered the Hall of Representatives, at the head of a band of followers, and springing into the speaker's chair shouted: "Shall this harbor of Yankee Democracy be burned? All for it will say, Aye!" Early in the war Madison had written to Jefferson, "We do not apprehend invasion by land,"—the one thing, it would seem, that a commander-in-chief should have apprehended, whose single aim was the invasion and conquest of the enemy's territory. His devotion to this one purpose, to the exclusion of any other idea of either offense or defense, and in spite of continued failure, was almost an infatuation. Within a year of that expression of confidence to Mr. Jefferson the whole coast was blockaded from the eastern end of Long Island Sound to the mouth of the Mississippi. For a year before Washington was taken, the shores of Chesapeake Bay were harassed and raided and devastated by a blockading force, till the people were reduced almost to the condition of a conquered country. Two months before the British commanders, Ross and Cockburn, went up the Potomac, Mr. Gallatin, who was then in London, had informed the President that the fleet was to be reinforced for that very purpose; but neither he nor Congress took any effective measures to meet a danger so imminent. Their eyes were fixed with a far-off gaze across the Northern border, while only five hundred regular troops, a body of untrained militia who had never heard the whistle of a bullet, and a few gunboats on the Potomac, guarded the national capital against a British fleet, a thousand marines, and thirty-five hundred men from Wellington's best regiments. The President fleeing in one direction with the secretary of war, the secretary of state, and the general in command; Mrs. Madison fleeing in another, with her reticule filled with silver spoons snatched up in haste as she left the White House;[15] behind them all as they fled, the horizon red with the blaze of the largest navy yard in the country and of all the public buildings, but one, of the capital,—these incidents are an amazing commentary on the early assertion that invasion was not to be apprehended.
The end of this wretched war, which has been foolishly called the second war of independence, came four months afterward. Never was a peace so welcome as this was on all sides. England was exhausted with the long contest with Napoleon; and now, that being over, as there was no practical question to differ about with the United States, the ministry were not unwilling to listen to the demands of the commercial and manufacturing classes. In America so great was the universal joy that the Federalists and the Democrats forgot their differences and their hates, and wept and laughed by turns in each other's arms and kissed each other like women. One party was delivered from calamities for which, if continued much longer, there seemed only one desperate and dreaded remedy; the other was overjoyed to back out of a blunder which was the straight and broad road to national ruin. Of all men, Mr. Madison had the most reason to be glad for a safe deliverance from the consequences of his own want of foresight and want of firmness. Less than two years remained to him of his public career. In that brief period much was forgotten and more forgiven—as our national way is—in the promise of a great prosperity to be speedily achieved in the released energies of a vigorous and industrious people. He had not again to choose between differing factions of his own party, nor to carry out a policy against the will of a formidable opposition. To the Federalists hardly a name was left in the progress of events at home and abroad; while all immediate vital questions of difference vanished, the party in power remained in almost undisputed ascendency. The most important Democratic measures it then insisted upon were a national bank and a protective tariff. To the establishment of a bank Mr. Madison assented against his own conviction that any provision could be found for it in the Constitution; and a tariff, both for revenue and for the protection and encouragement of American industry, he agreed with his party was the true policy.
For nearly twenty years after his retirement to Montpellier—a name which, with rare exceptions, he always spelled correctly, and not in the American way—it was his privilege to live a watchful observer of the prosperity of his country. If it ever occurred to him in his secret soul that at the period of his preëminence he had done anything to arrest that prosperity, he gave no sign. He loved rather to remember and sometimes to recall to others the part he had taken in the nurture of the young republic in the feeble days of its infancy. Of his own administration and the events of that time he had much less to say than of the true interpretation of the Constitution, of the intent of its framers, and the circumstances that influenced their deliberations. His voluminous correspondence shows the bent of his mind as a legislator and a student of fundamental law; and on that, rather than on his ability and success as the chief magistrate of the nation, rests his true fame.
These twenty years, though passed in retirement, were not years of leisure. "I have rarely," he wrote in 1827, "during the period of my public life, found my time less at my disposal than since I took my leave of it; nor have I the consolation of finding, that as my powers of application necessarily decline, the demands on them proportionally decrease." Much as he wrote upon questions of an earlier period, there were no topics of the current time that did not arouse his interest. Upon the subject of slavery he thought much and wrote much and always earnestly and humanely. How to get rid of it was a problem which he never solved to his own satisfaction. Though it was one he always longed to see through, it never occurred to him that the way to abolish slavery was—to abolish it. How kind he was as a master, Paul Jennings bears witness. "I never," he says, "saw him in a passion, and never knew him to strike a slave, though he had over a hundred; neither would he allow an overseer to do it." He rebuked those who were in fault; but, adds Jennings, he would "never mortify them by doing it before others." It will be remembered that on the first occasion of his being a candidate for public office he refused to follow the universal Virginian habit of "treating" the electors. To the principle which governed him then he adhered through life, and his letters show the warm interest he always took in every phase of the temperance movement. "I don't think he drank a quart of brandy in his whole life," says Jennings. A single glass of wine was all he ever took at dinner, and this he diluted with water, when, says the same witness, "he had hard drinkers at his table who had put away his choice madeira pretty freely." This will go for something, considering the times, with even the most zealous of the modern supporters of that cause; but they must be quite satisfied to know that "for the last fifteen years of his life he drank no wine at all." Consideration for his own health, always feeble, may have led him to this abstinence; but it is rather remarkable that a man of his position should have held, fifty years ago, the advanced notions which he certainly did upon this question, and that the doubt only of the possibility of enforcing laws for prohibiting the manufacture and sale of spirits seems to have withheld him from proposing them.
Social as well as moral questions he discussed with evident interest and without passion or prejudice. Aside from the party meaning of the term, he belonged to that school of democracy, now extinct, which believed that the highest object of human exertion is to improve man's condition, and to secure to each the rights which belong to all. He did not agree with Robert Owen as to methods; but neither did he reject his schemes as inevitably absurd because they were new and untried. One would not gather from his correspondence with Frances Wright that this was the notorious Fanny Wright whom the world chose to consider, as its way is, a disreputable and probably wicked woman, inasmuch as she proposed some radical changes in its social relations which she thought would be a gain. He gave much attention to popular education, and all the influence he could command was devoted, through all the later years of his life, to the establishment and well-being of the University of Virginia. Education, he maintained, was the true foundation of civil liberty, and on it, therefore, rested the welfare and stability of the republic. It is probable that he would have drawn a line at difference of color then, simply because of the difference of condition implied by color. But he made no such distinction in sex. Sixty-three years ago he saw his way quite clearly on a question which is a sore trial now to many timid souls. The capacity of "the female mind" for the highest education cannot, he said, "be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science." The capacity, he assumed, carried with it the right. In short, he was ready always to consider fairly questions relating to the well-being of society which since his time have deeply agitated the country; and he approached them all much in the spirit of the reformer who hopes to leave the world a little better and happier because he has lived in it.
"Mr. Madison, I think," says Paul Jennings, "was one of the best men that ever lived." This is the testimony of an intelligent man whose opportunities of knowing the personal qualities of him of whom he was speaking were more intimate than those of any other person could be except Mrs. Madison. "He was guilty," says Hildreth, "of the greatest political wrong and crime which it is possible for the head of a nation to commit." One saw the private gentleman, always conscientious and considerate in his personal relations to other men; the other judged the public man, moved by ambition, entangled in party ties and supposed party obligations, his moral sense blinded by the necessities of political compromises to reach party ends. It is not impossible to strike a just balance between these opposing estimates, though one is that of a servant, the other that of a learned and judicious historian.
Mr. Madison left a legacy of "Advice to My Country," to be read after his death and to "be considered as issuing from the tomb, where truth alone can be respected, and the happiness of man alone consulted." It is the lesson of his life, as he wished his countrymen to understand it. "The advice," he said, "nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is, that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened, and the disguised one as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise." The thoughtful reader, as he turns to the first page of this volume to recall the date of Mr. Madison's death, will hardly fail to note how few the years were before these open and disguised enemies, against whom he warned his countrymen, were found only in that party which he had done so much, from the time of the adoption of the Constitution, to keep in power.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dr. Draper has kindly put into our hands the correspondence between himself and Mr. Madison, and we copy these genealogical notes in full, with the letter in which they were sent, as all that the ex-President had to say about his ancestry:—
Montpellier, February 1, 1834.