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Giants of America

The Founding Fathers

James Madision

JAMES MADISON

The Home of James Madison

SYDNEY HOWARD GAY

ARLINGTON HOUSE New Rochelle, N.Y.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

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.

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.

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.

From a miniature in the possession of Dr. H. M. Cutts,
Brookline, Mass.

Autograph from a letter kindly loaned by Dr. Cutts.

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 negro huts; and the "administrative hierarchy" was the priest, who was more at home at the tavern or a horse-race than in the discharge of his clerical duties.

As Mr. Madison had only to say of his 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 to look out for extraordinary things in this world, for I think my sensations for many months have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life; though it may be better with me after some time; but I hardly dare expect it, and therefore have little spirit or elasticity to set about anything that is difficult in acquiring, and useless in possessing after one has exchanged time for eternity." In the same letter he assures his friend that he approves of his choice of history and morals as the subjects of his winter studies; but, he adds, "I doubt not but you design to season them with a little divinity now and then, which, like the philosopher's stone in the hands of a good man, will turn them and every lawful acquirement into the nature of itself, and make them more precious than fine gold."

The bent of his mind at this time seems to have been decidedly religious. He was a diligent student of the Bible, and, Mr. Rives says, "he explored the whole history and evidences of Christianity on every side, through clouds of witnesses and champions for and against, from the fathers and schoolmen down to the infidel philosophers of the eighteenth century." So wide a range of theological study is remarkable in a youth of only two or three and twenty years of age; but, remembering that he was at this time living at home, it is even more remarkable that in the house of an ordinary planter in Virginia a hundred and twenty years ago could be found a library so rich in theology as to admit of study so exhaustive. But in Virginia history nothing is impossible.

His studies on this subject, however, whether wide or limited, bore good fruit. Religious intolerance was at that time common in his immediate neighborhood, and it aroused him to earnest and open opposition; nor did that opposition cease till years afterward, when freedom of conscience was established by law in Virginia, largely by his labors and influence. Even in 1774, when all the colonies were girding themselves for the coming revolutionary conflict, he turned aside from a discussion of the momentous question of the hour, in a letter to his friend[3] in Philadelphia, and exclaimed with unwonted heat:—

"But away with politics!... That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some; and, to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such purposes. There are at this time in the adjacent country not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox. I have neither patience to hear, talk, or think of anything relative to this matter; for I have squabbled and scolded, abused and ridiculed so long about it to little purpose that I am without common patience."

These are stronger terms than the mild-tempered Madison often indulged in. But he felt strongly. Probably he, no more than many other wiser and older men, understood what was to be the end of the political struggle which was getting so earnest; but evidently in his mind it was religious rather than civil liberty which was to be guarded. "If the Church of England," he says in the same letter, "had been the established and general religion in all the Northern colonies, as it has been among us here, and uninterrupted harmony had prevailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us."

He congratulated his friend that they had not permitted the tea-ships to break cargo in Philadelphia; and Boston, he hoped, would "conduct matters with as much discretion as they seem to do with boldness." These things were interesting and important; but "away with politics! Let me address you as a student and philosopher, and not as a patriot." Shut off from any contact with the stirring incidents of that year in the towns of the coast, he lost something of the sense of proportion. To a young student, solitary, ill in body, perhaps a trifle morbid in mind, a little discontented that all the learning gained at Princeton could find no better use than to save schooling for the six youngsters at home,—to him it may have seemed that liberty was more seriously threatened by that outrage, under his own eyes, of "five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments," than by any tax which Parliament could contrive. Not that he overestimated the importance of this wrong, but that he underestimated the importance of that. He was not long, however, in getting the true perspective.

CHAPTER II

THE YOUNG STATESMAN

Madison's place, both from temperament and from want of physical vigor, was in the council, not in the field. One of his early biographers says that he joined a military company, raised in his own county, in preparation for war; but this, there can hardly be a doubt, is an error. He speaks with enthusiasm of the "high-spirited" volunteers, who came forward to defend "the honor and safety of their country;" but there is no intimation that he chose for himself that way of showing his patriotism. But of the Committee of Safety, appointed in his county in 1774, he was made a member,—perhaps the youngest, for he was then only twenty-three years old.

Eighteen months afterward he was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1776, and this he calls "my first entrance into public life." It gave him also an opportunity for some distinction, which, whatever may have been his earlier plans, opened public life to him as a career. The first work of the convention was to consider and adopt a series of resolutions instructing the Virginian delegates in the Continental Congress, then in session at Philadelphia, to urge an immediate declaration of independence. The next matter was to frame a Bill of Rights and a Constitution of government for the province. Madison was made a member of the committee to which this latter subject was referred. One question necessarily came up for consideration which had for him a peculiar interest, and in any discussion of which he, no doubt, felt quite at ease. This was concerning religious freedom. An article in the proposed Declaration of Rights provided that "all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate, unless, under color of religion, any man disturb the peace, happiness, or safety of society." It does not appear that Mr. Madison offered any objection to the article in the committee; but when the report was made to the convention he moved an amendment. He pointed out the distinction between the recognition of an absolute right and the toleration of its exercise; for toleration implies the power of jurisdiction. He proposed, therefore, instead of providing that "all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion," to declare that "all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of conscience;" and that "no man or class of men ought, on account of religion, to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges, nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities, unless, under color of religion, the preservation of equal liberty and the existence of the state be manifestly endangered." This distinction between the assertion of a right and the promise to grant a privilege only needed to be pointed out. But Mr. Madison evidently meant more; he meant not only that religious freedom should be assured, but that an Established Church, which, as we have already seen, he believed to be dangerous to liberty, should be prohibited. Possibly the convention was not quite ready for this latter step; or possibly its members thought that, as the greater includes the less, should freedom of conscience be established a state church would be impossible, and the article might therefore be stripped of supererogation and verbiage. At any rate, it was reduced one half, and finally adopted in this simpler form: "That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience." Thus it stands to this day in the Bill of Rights of Virginia, and of other States which subsequently made it their own, possessing for us the personal interest of being the first public work of the coming statesman.

Madison was thenceforth for the next forty years a public man. Of the first Assembly under the new Constitution he was elected a member. For the next session also he was a candidate, but failed to be returned for a reason as creditable to him as it was uncommon then, whatever it may be now, in Virginia. "The sentiments and manners of the parent nation," Mr. Rives says, still prevailed in Virginia, "and the modes of canvassing for popular votes in that country were generally practiced. The people not only tolerated, but expected and even required, to be courted and treated. No candidate who neglected those attentions could be elected." But the times, Mr. Madison thought, seemed "to favor a more chaste mode of conducting elections," and he "determined to attempt, by an example, to introduce it." He failed signally; "the sentiments and manners of the parent nation" were too much for him. He solicited no votes; nobody got drunk at his expense; and he lost the election. An attempt was made to contest the return of his opponent on the ground of corrupt influence, but, adds Mr. Rives, in his sesquipedalian measure, "for the want of adequate proof to sustain the allegations of the petition which in such cases it is extremely difficult to obtain with the requisite precision, the proceeding was unavailing except as a perpetual protest, upon the legislative records of the country, against a dangerous abuse, of which one of her sons, so qualified to serve her, and destined to be one of her chief ornaments, was the early though temporary victim." Mr. Rives does not mean that Mr. Madison was for a little while in early life the victim of a vicious habit, but that he lost votes because he would do nothing to encourage it in others.

The country lost a good representative, but their loss was his gain. The Assembly immediately elected him a member of the governor's council, and in this position he so grew in public favor that, two years afterward (1780), he was chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was still under thirty, and had he been even a more brilliant young man than he really was, it would not have been to his discredit had he only been seen for the next year or two, if seen at all, in the background. He had taken his seat among men, every one of whom, probably, was his senior, and among whom were many of the wisest men in the country, not "older" merely, but "better soldiers."

If not the darkest, at least there was no darker year in the Revolution than that of 1780. Within a few days of his arrival at Philadelphia, Madison wrote to Jefferson—then governor of Virginia—his opinion of the state of the country. It was gloomy but not exaggerated. The only bright spot he could see was the chance that Clinton's expedition to South Carolina might be a failure; but within little more than a month from the date of his letter, Lincoln was compelled to surrender Charleston, and the whole country south of Virginia seemed about to fall into the hands of the enemy. Could he have foreseen that calamity, his apprehensions might have been changed to despair; for he writes:—

"Our army threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or living on free quarter; the public treasury empty; public credit exhausted, nay, the private credit of purchasing agents employed, I am told, as far as it will bear; Congress complaining of the extortion of the people, the people of the improvidence of Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most mature and systematic measures, and the urgency of occasions admitting only of temporary expedients, and these expedients generating new difficulties; Congress recommending plans to the several States for execution, and the States separately rejudging the expediency of such plans, whereby the same distrust of concurrent exertions that had damped the ardor of patriotic individuals must produce the same effect among the States themselves; an old system of finance discarded as incompetent to our necessities, an untried and precarious one substituted, and a total stagnation in prospect between the end of the former and the operation of the latter. These are the outlines of the picture of our public situation. I leave it to your own imagination to fill them up."

He saw more clearly, perhaps, after the experience of one session of Congress, the true cause of all these troubles; at any rate, he was able, in a letter written in November of that year (1780), to state it tersely and explicitly. The want of money, he wrote to a friend, "is the source of all our public difficulties and misfortunes. One or two millions of guineas properly applied would diffuse vigor and satisfaction throughout the whole military department, and would expel the enemy from every part of the United States."

But nobody knew better than he the difficulty of raising funds except by borrowing abroad, and that this was a precarious reliance. There must be some sort of substitute for money. In specific taxation he had no faith. Such taxes, if paid at all, would be paid, virtually, in the paper currency or certificates of the States, and these had already fallen to the ratio of one hundred to one; they kept on falling till they reached the rate of a thousand to one, and then soon became altogether worthless. When the estimate for the coming year was under consideration, he proposed to Congress that the States should be advised to abandon the issue of this paper currency. "It met," he says, "with so cool a reception that I did not much urge it." The sufficient answer to the proposition was, that "the practice was manifestly repugnant to the Acts of Congress," and as these were disregarded and could not be enforced, a mere remonstrance would be quite useless. The Union was little more than a name under the feeble bonds of the Confederation, and each State was a law unto itself. Not that in this case there was much reasonable ground for complaint; for what else could the States do? Where there was no money there must be something to take its place; a promise to pay must be accepted instead of payment. The paper answered a temporary purpose, though it was plain that in the end it would be good for nothing.

The evil, however, was manifestly so great that there was only the more reason for trying to mitigate it, if it could not be cured. Madison, like the rest, had his remedy. He proposed, in a letter to one of his colleagues, that the demand for army supplies should be duly apportioned among the people, their collection rigorously enforced, and payment made in interest-bearing certificates, not transferable, but to be redeemed at a specified time after the war was over. The plan would undoubtedly have put a stop to the circulation of a vast volume of paper money if the producers would have exchanged the products of their labor for certificates, useless at the time of exchange, and having only a possible prospective value in case of the successful termination of an uncertain war. Patriotic as the people were, they neither would nor could have submitted to such a law, nor had Congress the power to enforce it. But Mr. Madison did not venture apparently to urge his plan beyond its suggestion to his colleague.

Why the Assembly of Virginia should have proposed to elect an extra delegate to Congress, early in 1781, is not clear, unless it be that one of the number, Joseph Jones, being also a member of the Assembly, passed much of his time in Richmond. It does not appear, however, that the delegate extraordinary was ever sent, perhaps because it was known to Mr. Madison's friends that it would be a mortification to him. There was certainly no good reason for any distrust of either his ability or his industry. One could hardly be otherwise than industrious who had it in him—if the story be true—to take but three hours out of the twenty-four for sleep during the last year of his college course, that he might crowd the studies of two years into one. He seemed to love work for its own sake, and he was a striking example of how much virtue there is in steadiness of pursuit. Not that he had at this time any special goal for his ambition. His aim seemed to be simply to do the best he could wherever he might be placed; to discharge faithfully, and to the best of such ability as he had, whatever duty was intrusted to him. His report of the proceedings in the congressional session of 1782-83, and the letters written during those years and the year before, show that he was not merely diligent but absorbed in the duties of his office.

He was more faithful to his constituents than his constituents sometimes were to him. Anything that might happen at that period for want of money can hardly be a matter of surprise; but Virginia, even then, should have been able, it would seem, to find enough to enable its members of Congress to pay their board-bills. He complains gently in his Addisonian way of the inconvenience to which he was put for want of funds. "I cannot," he writes to Edmund Randolph, "in any way make you more sensible of the importance of your kind attention to pecuniary remittances for me, than by informing you that I have for some time past been a pensioner on the favor of Hayne Solomon, a Jew broker." A month later he writes, that to draw bills on Virginia has been tried, "but in vain;" nobody would buy them; and he adds, "I am relapsing fast into distress. The case of my brethren is equally alarming." Within a week he again writes: "I am almost ashamed to reiterate my wants so incessantly to you, but they begin to be so urgent that it is impossible to suppress them." But the Good Samaritan, Solomon, is still an unfailing reliance. "The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, near the coffee house, is a fund which will preserve me from extremities; but I never resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all recompense. The price of money is so usurious that he thinks it ought to be extorted from none but those who aim at profitable speculations. To a necessitous delegate he gratuitously spares a supply out of his private stock." It is a pretty picture of the simplicity of the early days of the Republic. Between the average modern member and the money-broker, under such circumstances, there would lurk, probably, a contract for carrying the mails or for Indian supplies.

Relief, however, came at last. An appeal was made in a letter to the governor of Virginia, which was so far public that anybody about the executive office might read it. The answer to this letter, says Mr. Madison, "seems to chide our urgency." But there soon came a bill for two hundred dollars, which, he adds, "very seasonably enabled me to replace a loan by which I had anticipated it. About three hundred and fifty more (not less) would redeem me completely from the class of debtors." It is to be hoped it came without further chiding.[4]

The young member was not less attentive to his congressional duties because of these little difficulties in the personal ways and means. Military movements seem, without altogether escaping his attention, to have interested him the least. In his letters to the public men at home, which were meant in some degree to give such information as in later times the newspapers supplied, questions relating to army affairs, even news directly from the army, occupy the least space. They are not always, for that reason, altogether entertaining reading. One would be glad, occasionally, to exchange their sonorous and rounded periods for any expression of quick, impulsive feeling. "I return you," he writes to Pendleton, "my fervent congratulations on the glorious success of the combined armies at York and Gloucester. We have had from the Commander-in-Chief an official report of the fact,"—and so forth and so forth; and then for a page or more is a discussion of the condition of British possessions in the East Indies, that "rich source of their commerce and credit, severed from them, perhaps forever;" of "the predatory conquest of Eustatia;" and of the "relief of Gibraltar, which was merely a negative advantage;"—all to show that "it seems scarcely possible for them much longer to shut their ears against the voice of peace." There is not a word in all this that is not quite true, pertinent, reflective, and becoming a statesman; but neither is there a word of sympathetic warmth and patriotic fervor which at that moment made the heart of a whole people beat quicker at the news of a great victory, and in the hope that the cause was gained at last.

All the letters have this preternatural solemnity, as if each was a study in style after the favorite Addisonian model. One wonders if he did not, in the privacy of his own room and with the door locked, venture to throw his hat to the ceiling and give one hurrah under his breath at the discomfiture of the vain and self-sufficient Cornwallis. But he seems never to have been a young man. At one and twenty he gravely warned his friend Bradford not "to suffer those impertinent fops that abound in every city to divert you from your business and philosophical amusements.... You will make them respect and admire you more by showing your indignation at their follies, and by keeping them at a becoming distance." It was his loss, however, and our gain. He was one of the men the times demanded, and without whom they would have been quite different times and followed by quite different results. The sombre hue of his life was due partly, no doubt, to natural temperament; partly to the want of health in his earlier manhood, which led him to believe that his days were numbered; but quite as much, if not more than either, to a keen sense of the responsibility resting upon those to whom had fallen the conduct of public affairs.

CHAPTER III

IN CONGRESS

Madison had grown steadily in the estimation of his colleagues, as is shown, especially in 1783, by the frequency of his appointment upon important committees. He was a member of that one to which was intrusted the question of national finances, and it is plain, even in his own modest report of the debates of that session, that he took an important part in the long discussions of the subject, and exercised a marked influence upon the result. The position of the government was one of extreme difficulty. To tide over an immediate necessity, a further loan had been asked of France in 1782, and bills were drawn against it without waiting for acceptance. It was not very likely, but it was not impossible, that the bills might go to protest; but even should they be honored, so irregular a proceeding was a humiliating acknowledgment of poverty and weakness, to which some of the delegates, Mr. Madison among them, were extremely sensitive.

The national debt altogether was not less than forty million dollars. To provide for the interest on this debt, and a fund for expenses, it was necessary to raise about three million dollars annually. But the sum actually contributed for the support of the confederate government in 1782 was only half a million dollars. This was not from any absolute inability on the part of the people to pay more; for the taxes before the war were more than double that sum, and for the first three or four years of the war it was computed that, with the depreciation of paper money, the people submitted to an annual tax of about twenty million dollars. The real difficulty lay in the character of the Confederation. Congress might contrive but it could not command. The States might agree, or they might disagree, or any two or more of them might only agree to disagree; and they were more likely to do either of the last two than the first. There was no power of coercion anywhere. All that Congress could do was to try to frame laws that would reconcile differences, and bring thirteen supreme governments upon some common ground of agreement. To distract and perplex it still more, it stood face to face with a well-disciplined and veteran army which might at any moment, could it find a leader to its mind, march upon Philadelphia and deal with Congress as Cromwell dealt with the Long Parliament. There were some men, probably, in that body, who would not have been sorry to see that precedent followed. Washington might have done it if he would. Gates probably would have done it if he could.

To avert this threatened danger; to contrive taxation that should so far please the taxed that they would refrain from using the power in their hands to escape altogether any taxation for general purposes,—was the knotty problem this Congress had to solve in order to save the Confederacy from dissolution. There was no want of plans and expedients; neither were there wanting men in that body who clearly understood the conditions of the problem, and how it might be solved, and whose aim was direct and unfaltering. Chief among them were Hamilton, Wilson, Ellsworth, and Madison. However wrong-headed, or weak, or intemperate others may have been, these men were usually found together on important questions; differing sometimes in details, but unmoved by passion or prejudice, and strong from reserved force, they overwhelmed their opponents at the right moment with irresistible argument and by weight of character.

In the discussion of the more important questions Mr. Madison is conspicuous—conspicuous without being obtrusive. A reader of the debates can hardly fail to be struck with his familiarity with English constitutional law, and its application to the necessities of this offshoot of the English people in setting up a government for themselves. The stores of knowledge he drew upon must needs have been laid up in the years of quiet study at home before he entered upon public life. For there was no congressional library then where a member could "cram" for debate; and—though Philadelphia already had a fair public library—the member who was armed at all points must have equipped himself before entering Congress. In this respect Madison probably had no equal, except Hamilton, and possibly Ellsworth. To the need of such a library, however, he and others were not insensible. As chairman of a committee he reported a list of books "proper for the use of Congress," and advised their purchase. The report declared that certain authorities upon international law, treaties, negotiations, and other questions of legislation were absolutely indispensable, and that the want of them "was manifest in several Acts of Congress." But the Congress was not to be moved by a little thing of that sort.

The attitude of his own State sometimes embarrassed him in the satisfactory discharge of his duty as a legislator. The earliest distinction he won after entering Congress was as chairman of a committee to enforce upon Mr. Jay, then minister to Spain, the instructions to adhere tenaciously to the right of navigation on the Mississippi in his negotiations for an alliance with that power. Mr. Madison, in his dispatch, maintained the American side of the question with a force and clearness to which no subsequent discussion of the subject ever added anything. He left nothing unsaid that could be said to sustain the right either on the ground of expediency, of national comity, or of international law; and his arguments were not only in accordance with his own convictions, but with the instructions of the Assembly of his own State. It was a question of deep interest to Virginia, whose western boundary at that time was the Mississippi. But Virginia soon afterward shifted her position. The course of the war in the Southern States in the winter of 1780-81 aroused in Georgia and the Carolinas renewed anxiety for an alliance with Spain. The fear of their people was that, in case of the necessity for a sudden peace while the British troops were in possession of those States or parts of them, they might be compelled to remain as British territory under the application of the rule of uti possidetis. It was urged, therefore, that the right to the Mississippi should be surrendered to Spain, if it were made the condition of an alliance. In deference to her neighbors, Virginia proposed that Mr. Jay should be reinstructed accordingly.

Mr. Madison was not in the least shaken in his conviction. With him, the question was one of right rather than of expediency. But not many at that time ventured to doubt that representatives must implicitly obey the instructions of their constituents. He yielded; but not till he had appealed to the Assembly to reconsider their decision. The scale was turned; in deference to the wishes of the Southern States new orders were sent to Mr. Jay. Mr. Madison, however, had not long to wait for his justification. When the immediate danger, which had so alarmed the South, had passed away, Virginia returned to her original position. New instructions were again sent to her representatives, and Mr. Jay was once more advised by Congress that on the Mississippi question his government would yield nothing.

On another question, two years afterward, Mr. Madison refused to accept a position of inconsistency in obedience to instructions which his State attempted to force upon him. No one saw more clearly than he how absolutely necessary to the preservation of the Confederacy was the settlement of its financial affairs on some sound and just basis; and no one labored more earnestly and more intelligently than he to bring about such a settlement. Congress had proposed in 1781 a tax upon imports, each State to appoint its own collectors, but the revenue to be paid over to the federal government to meet the expenses of the war. Rhode Island alone, at first, refused her assent to this scheme. An impost law of five per cent. upon certain imports and a specific duty upon others for twenty-five years were an essential part of the plan of 1783 to provide a revenue to meet the interest on the public debt and for other general purposes. That Rhode Island would continue obstinate on this point was more than probable; and the only hope of moving her was that she should be shamed or persuaded into compliance by the combined influence of all the other States.

Mr. Madison was as bitter as he could ever be in his reflections upon that State, whose course, he thought, showed a want of any sense of honor or of patriotism. Virginia, he argued, should rebuke her by making her own compliance with the law the more emphatic, as an example for all the rest. But Virginia did exactly the other thing. At the moment when debate upon the revenue law was the most earnest, and the prospect of carrying it the most hopeful; when a committee appointed by Congress had already started on their journey northward to expostulate with, and if possible conciliate, Rhode Island,—at that critical moment came news from Virginia that she had revoked her assent of a previous session to the impost law. This was equivalent to instructing her delegates in Congress to oppose any such measure. The situation was an awkward one for a representative who had put himself among the foremost of those who were pushing this policy, and who had been making invidious reflections upon a State which opposed it. The rule that the will of the constituents should govern the representative, he now declared, had its exceptions, and here was a case in point. He continued to enforce the necessity of a general law to provide a revenue, though his arguments were no longer pointed with the selfishness and want of patriotism shown by the people of Rhode Island. In the end his firmness was justified by Virginia, who again shifted her position when the new act was submitted to her.

The operation of the law was limited to five and twenty years. This Hamilton opposed and Madison supported; and in this difference some of the biographers of both see the foreshadowing of future parties. But it is more likely that neither of those statesmen thought of their difference of opinion as difference of principle. The question was, whether anything could be gained by a deference to that party which, both felt at that time, threatened to throw away, in adhering to the state-rights doctrine, all that was gained by the Revolution. They were agreed upon the necessity of a general law, supreme in all the States, to meet the obligation of a debt contracted for the general good. Unless—wrote Madison in February—"unless some amicable and adequate arrangements be speedily taken for adjusting all the subsisting accounts and discharging the public engagements, a dissolution of the Union will be inevitable." He was willing, therefore, to temporize, that the necessary assent of the State to such a law might be gained. Nobody hoped that the public debt would be paid off in twenty-five years; but to assume to levy a federal tax in the States for a longer period, or till the debt should be discharged, might so arouse state jealousy that it would be impossible to get an assent to the law anywhere. If the law for twenty-five years should be accepted, the threatened destruction of the government would be escaped for the present, and it might, at the end of a quarter of a century, be easy to reënact the law. At any rate, the evil day would be put off. This was Madison's reasoning.

But Hamilton did not believe in putting off a crisis. He had no faith in the permanency of the government as then organized. If he were right, what was the use or the wisdom of postponing a catastrophe till to-morrow? A possible escape from it might be even more difficult to-morrow than to-day. The essential difference between the two men was, that Madison only feared what Hamilton positively knew, or thought he knew. It was a difference of faith. Madison hoped something would turn up in the course of twenty-five years. Hamilton did not believe that anything good could turn up under the feeble rule of the Confederation. He would have presented to the States, then and there, the question, Would they surrender to the confederate government the right of taxation so long as that government thought it necessary? If not, then the Confederation was a rope of sand, and the States had resolved themselves into thirteen separate and independent governments. Therefore he opposed the condition of twenty-five years, and voted against the bill.

Nevertheless, when it became the law he gave it his heartiest support, and was appointed one of a committee of three to prepare an address, which Madison wrote, to commend it to the acceptance of the States. Indeed, the last serious effort made on behalf of the measure was made by Hamilton, who used all his eloquence and influence to induce the legislature of his own State to ratify it. It was the law against his better judgment; but being the law, he did his best to secure its recognition. But it failed of hearty support in most of the States, while in New York and Pennsylvania compliance with it was absolutely refused. Nothing, therefore, would have been lost had Hamilton's firmness prevailed in Congress; and nothing was gained by Madison's deference to the doctrine of state rights, unless it was that the question of a "more perfect Union" was put off to a more propitious time, when a reconstruction of the government under a new federal Constitution was possible. Meanwhile Congress borrowed the money to pay the interest on money already borrowed; the confederate government floundered deeper and deeper into inextricable difficulties; the thirteen ships of state drifted farther and farther apart, with a fair promise of a general wreck.

But the bill contained another compromise which was not temporary, and once made could not be easily unmade. Agreed to now, it became a condition of the adoption of the federal Constitution four years later; and there, as nobody now is so blind as not to see, it was the source of infinite mischief for nearly a century, till a third reconstruction of the Union was brought about by the war of 1861-65. The Articles of Confederation required that "all charges of war and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare" should be borne by the States in proportion to the value of their lands. It was proposed to amend this provision of the Constitution, and for lands substitute population, exclusive of Indians not taxed, as the basis for taxation. But here arose at once a new and perplexing question. There were, chiefly in one portion of the country, about 750,000 "persons held to service or labor,"—the euphuism for negro slaves which, evolved from some tender and sentimental conscience, came into use at this period. Should these, recognized only as property by state law, be counted as 750,000 persons by the laws of the United States?[5] Or should they, in the enumeration of population, be reckoned, in accordance with the civil law, as pro nullis, pro mortuis, pro quadrupedibus, and therefore not to be counted at all? Or should they, as those who owned them insisted, be counted, if included in the basis of taxation, as fractions of persons only?

The South contended that black slaves were not equal to white men as producers of wealth, and that, by counting them as such, taxation would be unequal and unjust. But whether counted as units or as fractions of units, the slaveholders insisted that representation should be according to that enumeration. The Northern reply was that, if representation was to be according to population, the slaves being included, then the slave States would have a representation of property, for which there would be no equivalent in States where there were no slaves; but if slaves were enumerated as a basis of representation, then that enumeration should also be taken to fix the rate of taxation.

Here, at any rate, was a basis for an interesting deadlock. One simple way out of it would have been to insist upon the doctrine of the civil law; to count the slaves only as pro quadrupedibus, to be left out of the enumeration of population as being no part of the State, as horses and cattle were left out. But the bonds of union hung loosely upon the sisters a hundred years ago; there was not one of them who did not think she was able to set up for herself and take her place among the nations as an independent sovereign; and it is more than likely that half of them would have refused to wear those bonds any longer on such a condition. There was no apprehension then that slavery was to become a power for evil in the State; but there was intense anxiety lest the States should fly asunder, form partial and local unions among neighbors, or become entangled in alliances with foreign nations, at the sacrifice of all, or much, that was gained by the Revolution. To make any concession, therefore, to slavery for the sake of the Union was hardly held to be a concession.

The curious student of history, however, who loves to study those problems of what might have happened if events that did not happen had come to pass, will find ample room for speculation in the possibilities of this one. Had there been no compromise, it is as easy to see now, as it was easy to foresee then, how quickly the feeble bond of union would have snapped asunder. But nevertheless, if the North had insisted that the slaves should neither be counted nor represented at all, or else should be reckoned in full and taxes levied accordingly, the consequent dissolution of the Confederacy might have had consequences which then nobody dreamed of. For it is not impossible, it is not even improbable, that, in that event, the year 1800 would have seen slavery in the process of rapid extinction everywhere except in South Carolina and Georgia. Had the event been postponed in those States to a later period, it would only have been because they had already found in the cultivation of indigo and rice a profitable use for slave-labor, which did not exist in the other slave States, where the supply of slaves was rapidly exceeding the demand. There can hardly be a doubt that, in case of the dissolution of the Confederacy, the Northern free-labor States would soon have consolidated into a strong union of their own. There was every reason for hastening it, and none so strong for hindering it as those which were overborne in the union which was actually formed soon afterward between the free-labor and slave-labor States. To such a Northern union the border States, as they sloughed off the old system, would have been naturally attracted; nor can there be a doubt that a federal union so formed would ultimately have proved quite as strong, quite as prosperous, quite as happy, and quite as respectable among the nations, as one purchased by compromises with slavery, followed, as those compromises were, by three quarters of a century of bitter political strife ending in a civil war.

But the Northern members were no less ready to make compromises than Southern members were to insist upon them, these no more understanding what they conceded than those understood what they gained; for the future was equally concealed from both. A committee reported that two blacks should be rated as one free man. This was unsatisfactory. To some it seemed too large, to others too small. Other ratios, therefore, were proposed,—three to one, three to two, four to one, and four to three. Mr. Madison at last, "in order," as he said, "to give a proof of the sincerity of his professions of liberality,"—and doubtless he meant to be liberal,—proposed "that slaves should be rated as five to three." His motion was adopted, but afterward reconsidered. Four days later—April 1st—Mr. Hamilton renewed the proposition, and it was carried, Madison says, "without opposition."[6] The law on this point was the precedent for the mischievous three fifths rule of the Constitution adopted four years later.

Youth finally overtook the young man during the last winter of his term in Congress, for he fell in love. But it was an unfortunate experience, and the outcome of it doubtless gave a more sombre hue than ever to his life. His choice was not a wise one. Probably Mr. Madison seemed a much older man than he really was at that period of his life, and to a young girl may have appeared really advanced in years. At any rate, it was his unhappy fate to be attached to a young lady of more than usual beauty and of irrepressible vivacity,—Miss Catherine Floyd, a daughter of General William Floyd of Long Island, N. Y., who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and who was a delegate to Congress from 1774 to 1783. Miss Catherine's sixteenth birthday was in April of the latter year; Madison was double her age, as his thirty-second birthday was a month earlier. His suit, however, was accepted, and they became engaged. But it was the father rather than the daughter who admired the suitor; for the older statesman better understood the character, and better appreciated the abilities, of his young colleague, and predicted a brilliant career for him. The girl's wisdom was of another kind. The future career which she foresaw and wanted to share belonged to a young clergyman, who—according to the reminiscences of an aged relative of hers—"hung round her at the harpsichord," and made love in quite another fashion than that of the solemn statesman whom the old general so approved of. It is altogether a pretty love story, and one's sympathy goes out to the lively young beauty, who was thinking of love and not of ambition, as she turned from the old young gentleman, discussing, with her wise father, the public debt and the necessity of an impost, to that really young young gentleman who knew how to hang over the harpsichord, and talked more to the purpose with his eyes than ever the other could with his lips. There is a tradition that she was encouraged to be thus on with the new love before she was off with the old, by a friend somewhat older than herself; and possibly this maturer lady may have thought that Madison would be better mated with one nearer his own age. At any rate, the engagement was broken off before long by the dismissal of the older lover, much to the father's disappointment, and in due time the young lady married the other suitor. There is no reason that I know of for supposing that she ever regretted that her more humble home was in a rectory, when it might have been, in due time, had she chosen differently, in the White House at Washington, and that afterward she might have lived, the remaining sixteen years of her life, the honored wife of a revered ex-President. Perhaps, however, she smiled in those later years at the recollection of having laughed in her gay and thoughtless youth at her solemn lover, and that, when at last she dismissed him, she sealed her letter—conveying to him alone, it may be, some merry but mischievous meaning—with a bit of rye-dough.[7]

Mr. Rives gives a letter from Jefferson to Madison at this time, which shows that he stood in need of consolation from his friends. "I sincerely lament," Mr. Jefferson wrote in his philosophical way, "the misadventure which has happened, from whatever cause it may have happened. Should it be final, however, the world presents the same and many other resources of happiness, and you possess many within yourself. Firmness of mind and unintermitting occupation will not long leave you in pain. No event has been more contrary to my expectations, and these were founded on what I thought a good knowledge of the ground. But of all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable." It was Solomon who said, "there be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not." This fourth was, "the way of a man with a maid." He might have added a fifth,—the way of a maid with a man, which, evidently, is what Jefferson meant.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY

As the election of the same delegate to Congress for consecutive sessions was then forbidden by the law of Virginia, Mr. Madison was not returned to that body in 1784. For a brief interval of three months he made good use of his time, we are told, by continuing his law studies, till in the spring of that year he was chosen to represent his county in the Virginia Assembly. It may be that "the sentiments and manners of the parent nation," which he lamented seven years before, had passed away, and nobody now insisted upon the privilege of getting drunk at the candidate's expense before voting for him. But it is more likely that the electors had not changed. The difference was in the candidate; they did not need to be allured to give their votes to a man whom they were proud to call upon to represent the county. Mr. Madison's reputation was already made by his three years in Congress, and he now easily took a place among the political leaders of his own State.

The position was hardly less conspicuous or less influential than that which he had held in the national Congress. What each State might do was of quite as much importance as anything the federal government might or could do. Congress could neither open nor close a single port in Virginia to commerce, whether domestic or foreign, without the consent of the State; it could not levy a tax of a penny on anything, whether goods coming in or products going out, if the State objected. As a member of Congress, Mr. Madison might propose or oppose any of these things; as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, he might, if his influence was strong enough, carry or forbid any or all of them, whatever might be the wishes of Congress. It was in the power of Virginia to influence largely the welfare of her neighbors, so far as it depended upon commerce, and indirectly that of every State in the Union.

In the Assembly, as in Congress, Mr. Madison's aim was to increase the powers of the federal government, for want of which it was rapidly sinking into imbecility and contempt. "I acceded," he says, "to the desire of my fellow-citizens of the county that I should be one of its representatives in the legislature," to bring about "a rescue of the Union and the blessings of liberty staked on it from an impending catastrophe." Early in the session the Assembly assented to the amendment to the Articles of Confederation proposed at the late session of Congress, which substituted population for a land valuation as the basis of representation and of taxation. The Assembly also asserted that all requisitions upon the States for the support of the general government and to provide for the public debt should be complied with, and payment of balances on old accounts should be enforced; and it assented to the recommendation of Congress that that body should have power for a limited period to control the trade with foreign nations having no treaty with the United States, in order that it might retaliate upon Great Britain for excluding American ships from her West India colonies. All these measures were designed for "the rescue of the Union," and they had, of course, Madison's hearty support. For it was absolutely essential, as he believed, that something should be done if the Union was to be saved, or to be made worth saving. But there were obstacles on all sides. The commercial States were reluctant to surrender the control over trade to Congress; in the planting States there was hardly any trade that could be surrendered. In Virginia the tobacco planter still clung to the old ways. He liked to have the English ship take his tobacco from the river bank of his own plantation, and to receive from the same vessel such coarse goods as were needed to clothe his slaves, with the more expensive luxuries for his own family,—dry goods for his wife and daughter; the pipe of madeira, the coats and breeches, the hats, boots, and saddles for himself and his sons. He knew that this year's crop went to pay—if it did pay—for last year's goods, and that he was always in debt. But the debt was on running account, and did not matter. The London factor was skillful in charges for interest and commissions, and the account for this year was always a lien on next year's crop. He knew, and the planter knew, that the tobacco could be sold at a higher price in New York or Philadelphia than the factor got, or seemed to get, for it in London; that the goods sent out in exchange were charged at a higher price than they could be bought for in the Northern towns. Nevertheless, the planter liked to see his own hogsheads rolled on board ship by his own negroes at his own wharf, and receive in return his own boxes and bales shipped direct from London at his own order, let it cost what it might. It was a shiftless and ruinous system; but the average Virginia planter was not over-quick at figures, nor even at reading and writing. He was proud of being lord of a thousand or two acres, and one or two hundred negroes, and fancied that this was to rule over, as Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and abundant, and where the host was always glad to welcome any guest who would relieve him of his own tediousness; but there was little luxury and no refinement where there was almost no culture. Of course there were a few homes and families of another order, where the women were refined and the men educated; but these were the exceptions. Society generally, with its bluff, loud, self-confident but ignorant planters, its numerous poor whites destitute of lands and of slaves, and its mass of slaves whose aim in life was to avoid work and escape the whip, was necessarily only one remove from semi-civilization.

It was not easy to indoctrinate such a people, more arrogant than intelligent, with new ideas. By the same token it might be possible to lead them into new ways before they would find out whither they were going. Mr. Madison hoped to change the wretched system of plantation commerce by a port bill, which he brought into the Assembly. Imposts require custom-houses, and obviously there could not be custom-houses nor even custom-officers on every plantation in the State. The bill proposed to leave open two ports of entry for all foreign ships. It would greatly simplify matters if all the foreign trade of the State could be limited to these two ports only. It would then be easy enough to enforce imposts, and the State would have something to surrender to the federal government to help it to a revenue, if, happily, the time should ever come when all the States should assent to that measure of salvation for the Union. Not that this was the primary object of those who favored this port law; but the question of commerce was the question on which everything hinged, and its regulation in each State must needs have an influence, one way or the other, upon the possibility of strengthening, even of preserving, the Union. Everything depended upon reconciling these state interests by mutual concessions. The South was jealous of the North, because trade flourished at the North and did not flourish at the South. It seemed as if this was at the expense of the South, and so, in a certain sense, it was. The problem was to find where the difficulty lay, and to apply the remedy.

If commerce flourished at the North, where each of the States had one or two ports of entry only, why should it not flourish in Virginia if regulated in the same way? If those centres of trade bred a race of merchants, who built their own ships, bought and sold, did their own carrying, competed with and stimulated each other, and encroached upon the trade of the South, why should not similar results follow in Virginia if she should confine her trade to two or three ports? If the buyer and the seller, the importer and the consumer, went to a common place of exchange in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and prosperity followed as a consequence, why should they not do the same thing at Norfolk? This was what Madison aimed to bring about by the port bill. But it was impossible to get it through the legislature till three more ports were added to the two which the bill at first proposed. When the planters came to understand that such a law would take away their cherished privilege of trade along the banks of the rivers, wherever anybody chose to run out a little jetty, the opposition was persistent. At every succeeding session, till the new federal Constitution was adopted, an attempt was made to repeal the act; and though that was not successful, each year new ports of entry were added. It did not, indeed, matter much whether the open ports of Virginia were two or whether they were twenty. There was a factor in the problem which neither Mr. Madison nor anybody else would take into the account. It was possible, of course, if force enough were used, to break up the traffic with English ships on the banks of the rivers; but when that was done, commerce would follow its own laws, in spite of the acts of the legislature, and flow into channels of its own choosing. It was not possible to transmute a planting State, where labor was enslaved, into a commercial State, where labor must be free.

However desirous Mr. Madison might be to transfer the power over commerce to the federal government, he was compelled, as a member of the Virginia legislature, to care first for the trade of his own State. No State could afford to neglect its own commercial interests so long as the thirteen States remained thirteen commercial rivals. It was becoming plainer and plainer every day that, while that relation continued, the less chance there was that thirteen petty, independent States could unite into one great nation. No foreign power would make a treaty with a government which could not enforce that treaty among its own people. Neither could any separate portion of that people make a treaty, as any other portion, the other side of an imaginary line, need not hold it in respect. What good was there in revenue laws, or, indeed, in any other laws in Massachusetts which Connecticut and Rhode Island disregarded? or in New York, if New Jersey and Pennsylvania laughed at them? or in Virginia, if Maryland held them in contempt?

But Mr. Madison felt that, if he could bring about a healthful state of things in the trade of his own State, there was at least so much done towards bringing about a healthful state of things in the commerce of the whole country. There came up a practical, local question which, when the time came, he was quick to see had a logical bearing upon the general question. The Potomac was the boundary line between Virginia and Maryland; but Lord Baltimore's charter gave to Maryland jurisdiction over the river to the Virginia bank; and this right Virginia had recognized, claiming only for herself the free navigation of the Potomac and the Pocomoke. Of course the laws of neither State were regarded when it was worth while to evade them; and nothing was easier than to evade them, since to the average human mind there is no privilege so precious as a facility for smuggling. Nobody, at any rate, seems to have thought anything about the matter till it came under Madison's observation after his return home from Congress. To him it meant something more than mere evasion of state laws and frauds on the state revenue. The subject fell into line with his reflections upon the looseness of the bonds that held the States together, and how unlikely it was that they would ever grow into a respectable or prosperous nation while their present relations continued. Virtually there was no maritime law on the Potomac, and hardly even the pretense of any. What could be more absurd than to provide ports of entry on one bank of a river, while on the other bank, from the source to the sea, the whole country was free to all comers? If the laws of either State were to be regarded on the opposite bank, a treaty was as necessary between them as between any two contiguous states in Europe.

Madison wrote to Jefferson, who was now a delegate in Congress, pointing out this anomalous condition of things on the Potomac, and suggesting that he should confer with the Maryland delegates upon the subject. The proposal met with Jefferson's approbation; he sought an interview with Mr. Stone, a delegate from Maryland, and, as he wrote to Madison, "finding him of the same opinion, [I] have told him I would, by letters, bring the subject forward on our part. They will consider it, therefore, as originated by this conversation." Why "they" should not have been permitted to "consider it as originated" from Madison's suggestion that Jefferson should have such a conversation is not quite plain; for it was Madison, not Jefferson, who had discovered that here was a wrong that ought to be righted, and who had proposed that each State should appoint commissioners to look into the matter and apply a remedy. So, also, so far as subsequent negotiation on this subject had any influence in bringing about the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it was only because Mr. Madison, having suggested the first practical step in the one case, seized an opportune moment in that negotiation to suggest a similar practical step in the other case. As it is so often said that the Annapolis Convention of 1786 was the direct result of the discussion of the Potomac question, it is worth while to explain what they really had to do with each other.

The Virginia commissioners were appointed early in the session on Mr. Madison's motion. Maryland moved more slowly, and it was not till the spring of 1785 that the commissioners met. They soon found that any efficient jurisdiction over the Potomac involved more interests than they, or those who appointed them, had considered. Existing difficulties might be disposed of by agreeing upon uniform duties in the two States, and this the commissioners recommended. But when the subject came before the Maryland legislature it took a wider range.

The Potomac Company, of which Washington was president, had been chartered only a few months before. The work it proposed to do was to make the upper Potomac navigable, and to connect it by a good road with the Ohio River. This was to encourage the settlement of Western lands. Another company was chartered about the same time to connect the Potomac and Delaware by a canal, where interstate traffic would be more immediate. Pennsylvania and Delaware must necessarily have a deep interest in both these projects, and the Maryland legislature proposed that those States be invited to appoint commissioners to act with those whom Maryland and Virginia had already appointed to settle the conflict between them upon the question of jurisdiction on the Potomac. Then it occurred to somebody: if four States can confer, why should not thirteen? The Maryland legislature thereupon suggested that all the States be invited to send delegates to a convention to take up the whole question of American commerce.

While this was going on in Maryland, the Virginia legislature was considering petitions from the principal ports of the State praying that some remedy might be devised for the commercial evils from which they were all suffering. The port bill had manifestly proved a failure. It was only a few weeks before that Madison had complained, in a letter to a friend, that "the trade of the country is in a most deplorable condition;" that the most "shameful frauds" were committed by the English merchants upon those in Virginia, as well as upon the planters who shipped their own tobacco; that the difference in the price of tobacco at Philadelphia and in Virginia was from eleven shillings to fourteen shillings in favor of the Northern ports; and that "the price of merchandise here is, at least, as much above, as that of tobacco is below, the Northern standard." He was only the more confirmed in his opinion that there was no cure for these radical evils except to surrender to the confederate government complete control over commerce. The debate upon these petitions was hot and long. It brought out the strongest men on both sides, Madison leading those who wished to give to Congress the power to regulate trade with foreign countries when no treaty existed; to make uniform commercial laws for all the States; and to levy an impost of five per cent. on imported merchandise, as a provision for the public debt and for the support of the federal government generally. A committee, of which he was a member, at length reported instructions to the delegates of the State in Congress to labor for the consent of all the States to these propositions. But in Committee of the Whole the resolutions were so changed and qualified—especially in limiting to thirteen years the period for which Congress was to be intrusted with a power so essential to the existence of the government—that the measure was given up by its friends as hopeless.

But before the report was disposed of Mr. Madison prepared a resolution, to be offered as a substitute, with the hope of reaching the same end in another way. This resolution provided for the appointment of five commissioners,—Madison to be one of them,—"who, or any three of whom, shall meet such commissioners as may be appointed in the other States of the Union, at a time and place to be agreed on, to take into consideration the trade of the United States; to examine the relative situations and trade of said States; to consider how far a uniform system in their commercial regulations may be necessary to their common interest and their permanent harmony; and to report to the several States such an act, relative to this great object, as, when unanimously ratified by them, will enable the United States, in Congress, effectually to provide for the same." This he was careful not to offer himself, but, as he says, it was "introduced by Mr. Tyler, an influential member, who, having never served in Congress, had more the ear of the House than those whose services there exposed them to an imputable bias." He adds that "it was so little acceptable that it was not then persisted in."

About the same time the action of the Maryland legislature on the Potomac question, and the report of the Potomac commissioners, came up for consideration. Mr. Madison said afterward that, as Maryland thought the concurrence of Pennsylvania and Delaware were necessary to the regulation of trade on that river, so those States would, probably, wish to ask for the concurrence of their neighbors in any proposed arrangement. "So apt and forcible an illustration," he adds, "of the necessity of an uniformity throughout all the States could not but favor the passage of a resolution which proposed a convention having that for its object."

As one of the Potomac commissioners, he knew, of course, what was coming from Maryland, and "how apt and forcible an illustration" it would seem, when it did come, of that resolution which he had written and had induced Mr. Tyler to offer. It did not matter that the resolution had been at the moment "so little acceptable," and therefore "not then persisted in." It was where it was sure, in the political slang of our day, to do the most good. And so it came about. All that Maryland had proposed, growing out of the consideration of the Potomac question, the Virginia legislature acceded to. Then, on the last day of the session, the Madison-Tyler resolution was taken from the table, where it had lain quietly for nearly two months, and passed. If some, who had been contending all winter against any action which should lead to a possibility of strengthening the federal government, failed to see how important a step they had taken to that very end; if any, who were fearful of federal usurpation and tenacious of state rights, were blind to the fact that the resolution had pushed aside the Potomac question and put the Union question in its place, Mr. Madison, we may be sure, was not one of that number. He had gained that for which he had been striving for years.

The commissioners appointed by the resolution soon came together. They appointed Annapolis as the place, and the second Monday of the following September (1786) as the time, of the proposed national convention; and they sent to all the other States an invitation to send delegates to that convention.

On September 11 commissioners from Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York assembled at Annapolis. Others had been appointed by North Carolina, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, but they were not present. Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, and Connecticut had taken no action upon the subject. As five States only were represented, the commissioners "did not conceive it advisable to proceed on the business of their mission," but they adopted an address, written by Alexander Hamilton, to be sent to all the States.

All the represented States, the address said, had authorized their commissioners "to take into consideration the trade and commerce of the United States; to consider how far an uniform system in their commercial intercourse and regulations might be necessary to their common interest and permanent harmony." But New Jersey had gone farther than this; her delegates were instructed "to consider how far an uniform system in their commercial regulations and other important matters might be necessary to the common interest and permanent harmony of the several States." This, the commissioners present thought, "was an improvement on the original plan, and will deserve to be incorporated into that of a future convention." They gave their reasons at length for this opinion, and, in conclusion, urged that commissioners from all the States be appointed to meet in convention at Philadelphia on the second Monday of the following May (1787), "to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union."

In the course of the winter delegates to this convention were chosen by the several States. Virginia was the first to choose her delegates; Madison was among them, and at their head was George Washington.

CHAPTER V

IN THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE

That the Annapolis Convention ever met to make smooth the way for the more important one which came together eight months afterward and framed a permanent Constitution for the United States was unquestionably due to the persistence and the political adroitness of Mr. Madison. But it was not exceptional work. The same diligence and devotion to public duty mark the whole of this period of three years through which he continued a member of the state legislature. As chairman of the judiciary committee he reduced with much labor the old colonial statutes to a body of laws befitting the condition of free citizens in an independent State. From his first to his last session he contended, though without success, for the faith of treaties and the honest payment of debts. The treaty with England provided that there should be "no lawful impediment on either side to the recovery of debts heretofore contracted." The legislature notified Congress that it should disregard this provision, on the plea that in relation to "slaves and other property" it had not been observed by Great Britain. Mr. Madison did not then know that—as he said three years later—"the infractions [of the treaty] on the part of the United States preceded even the violation on the other side in the instance of the negroes." He maintained, nevertheless, that the settlement of the difficulty, if it had any real foundation, belonged to Congress, the party to the treaty, and not to a State which had surrendered the treaty-making power; and that in common honesty one planter was not relieved from his obligation to pay a London merchant for goods and merchandise received before the war, because other planters had not been paid for the negroes and horses they had lost when the British troops invaded Virginia. At each of the three sessions of the legislature, while he was a member, he tried to bring that body to adopt some line of conduct which should not—to use his own words—"extremely dishonor us and embarrass Congress." It was useless; the repudiators were quite deaf to any appeals either to their honor or their patriotism.

On another question both he and his State were more fortunate. Religious freedom had to be once more fought for, and he was quick to come to the defense of a right which had first called forth his youthful enthusiasm. Two measures were brought forward from session to session to secure for the church the support of the state. The first was a bill for the incorporation of religious societies; but when it was pushed to its final passage it provided for the incorporation of Episcopal churches only. For this Mr. Madison consented to vote, though with reluctance, in the hope that the church party would be so far satisfied with this measure as to abstain from pushing another which was still more objectionable.

He was disappointed. Naturally those who had carried their first point were the more, not the less, anxious for further success. Now it was insisted that there should be a universal tax "for the support of teachers of the Christian religion." The tax-payer was to be permitted to name the religious society for the support of which he preferred to contribute. If he declined this voluntary acquiescence in the law, the money would be used in aid of a school; but from the tax itself none were to be exempt on any pretext. Madison was quick to see in such a law the possibility of religious intolerance, of compulsory uniformity enforced by the civil power, and of the suppression of any freedom of conscience or opinion. The act did not define who were and who were not "teachers of the Christian religion," and that necessarily would be left to the courts to decide. A state church would be the inevitable consequence; for it was not to be supposed that any dominant sect would rest till it secured the recognition by law of its own denomination as the sole representative of the Christian religion. To expect anything else was to ignore the teachings of all history.

The burden of opposition and debate fell, at first, almost solely upon Madison. Some of the wisest and best men of the State were slow to see, as he saw, that religious freedom was in danger from such legislation. There was, it was said, a sad falling-off in public morality as indifference to religion increased. There was no cure, it was declared, for prevalent and growing corruption except in the culture of the religious sentiment, and the teachers of religion, therefore, must be upheld and supported. But granting all this, Madison saw that the proposed remedy would be to give, not bread but a stone, and a stone that would be used in return as a weapon. It was impossible to regulate religious belief by act of the Assembly, and therefore it was worse than foolish to try.

It was due to him that the question was postponed from one session to the next. A copy of the bill was sent, meanwhile, into every county of the State for the consideration of the people, and that was aided by a "Memorial and Remonstrance," written by Madison, which was circulated everywhere for signature, in readiness for presentation to the next legislature. The bill, the memorial said, would be "a dangerous abuse of power," and the signers protested against it with unanswerable arguments, taking for a starting-point the assertion of the Bill of Rights, "that religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." It is not at all improbable that many signed this remonstrance, not so much because they believed it to be true as because it was a protest against a tax; that others were more moved by jealousy of the power of the Episcopal Church than they were by anxiety to protect religious liberty outside of their own sects. But whatever the motives, the movement was too formidable to be disregarded. It was made a test question in the election of members for the legislature of 1785-86; at that session the bill for the support of religious teachers was rejected, and in place of it was passed "an act for establishing religious freedom," written by Jefferson seven years before. This provided "that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."[8]

In the memorial and remonstrance Madison had said: "If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man. To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered." If the people of Virginia did not clearly comprehend this doctrine in all its length and breadth a hundred years ago, it is not quite easy to say who were then, or who are now, at liberty to throw stones at them. The assertion of the broadest religious freedom was no more new then than it is true that persecution for opinion's sake is now only an ancient evil. It was not till fifty years after Virginia had refused to tax her citizens for the support of religious teachers that Massachusetts repealed the law that had long imposed a similar burden upon her people.

It was in 1786, the last year of Madison's service in the Virginia Assembly before he returned to Congress, that the craze of paper money broke out again through all the States. The measure was carried in most of them, followed in the end by the usual disastrous consequences. Madison's anxiety was great lest his own State should be carried away by this delusion, and he led the opposition against some petitions sent to the Assembly praying for an issue of currency. The vote against it was too large to be due altogether to his influence; but he gave great strength and concentration to the opposition. In Virginia, tobacco certificates supplied in some measure the want of a circulating medium, and it was, therefore, easier there than in some of the other States to resist the clamor for a paper substitute for real money. A tobacco certificate at least represented something worth money. Madison assented to a bill which authorized the use of such certificates. But his "acquiescence," he wrote to Washington, "was extorted by a fear that some greater evil, under the name of relief to the people, would be substituted." He was "far from being sure," he added, that he "did right." But no evils with which he had to reproach himself followed that measure.

These three years of his life were probably among the happiest, if they were not altogether the happiest, in his long public career. There was little disappointment or anxiety, and evidently much genuine satisfaction as he saw how certainly he was gaining a high place in the estimation of his fellow-citizens for his devotion to the best interests of his native State. In the recesses of the legislature he had leisure for studies in which he evidently found great contentment. He traveled a good deal at intervals, especially at the North; learned much of the resources and character of the people outside of Virginia, and became acquainted with the leading men among them. Jefferson urged him to pass a summer with him in Paris; and some foreign diplomatic service was open to him, had he expressed a willingness to accept it. But he preferred to know something more of his own country while he had the leisure; and if his life was to be passed in public service, as now seemed probable to him, he chose, at least for the present, to serve his country at home, where he thought he was more needed, rather than abroad. In his orders for books sent to Jefferson the direction of his studies is evident. He sought largely for those which treated of the science of government; but they were not confined to that subject. Natural history had great charms for him. He was a diligent student of Buffon, and was anxious to find, if possible, the plates of his thirty-one volumes, in colors, that he might adorn the walls of his room with them. He made careful comparisons between the animals of other continents, as described and portrayed by the naturalist, and similar orders in America. All new inventions interested him. "I am so pleased," he writes, "with the new invented lamp that I shall not grudge two guineas for one of them." He had seen "a pocket compass of somewhat larger diameter than a watch, and which may be carried in the same way. It has a spring for stopping the vibration of the needle when not in use. One of these would be very convenient in case of a ramble into the western country." A small telescope, he suggests, might be fitted on as a handle to a cane, which might "be a source of many little gratifications," when "in walks for exercise or amusement objects present themselves which it might be matter of curiosity to inspect, but which it was difficult or impossible to approach." Jefferson writes him of a new invention, a pedometer; and he wants one for his own pocket. Trifles like these show the bent of his mind; and they show a contented mind as well.

While writing of important acts of the legislature of 1785, he is careful to give other information in a letter to Jefferson, which is not uninteresting as written ninety-eight years ago, and written by him.

"I. Rumsey," he says, "by a memorial to the last session, represented that he had invented a mechanism by which a boat might be worked with little labor, at the rate of from twenty-five to forty miles a day, against a stream running at the rate of ten miles an hour, and prayed that the disclosure of his invention might be purchased by the public. The apparent extravagance of his pretensions brought a ridicule upon them, and nothing was done. In the recess of the Assembly he exemplified his machinery to General Washington and a few other gentlemen, who gave a certificate of the reality and importance of the invention, which opened the ears of this Assembly to a second memorial. The act gives a monopoly for ten years, reserving a right to abolish it at any time by paying £10,000. The inventor is soliciting similar acts from other States, and will not, I suppose, publish the secret till he either obtains or despairs of them."

This intelligence was evidently not unheeded by Jefferson. In writing, some months after he received it, to a friend on the application of steam-power to grist-mills, then lately introduced in England, he adds: "I hear you are applying the same agent in America to navigate boats, and I have little doubt but that it will be applied generally to machines, so as to supersede the use of water-ponds, and of course to lay open all the streams for navigation." Nor does Madison seem to have been one of those who doubted if anything was to come of Rumsey's invention. All this was less than a hundred years ago, and now there is a steam-ferry between New York and Europe running about twice a day.

In a similar letter, a year later, he is careful, among grave political matters, to remember and report to the same friend that in the sinking of a well in Richmond, on the declivity of a hill, there had been found, "about seventy feet below the surface, several large bones, apparently belonging to a fish not less than the shark; and, what is more singular, several fragments of potter's ware in the style of the Indians. Before he [the digger] reached these curiosities he passed through about fifty feet of soft blue clay." Mr. Madison had only just heard of this discovery, and he had not seen the unearthed fragments. But he evidently accepts the story as true in coming from "unexceptionable witnesses." He adds, as a corroboration, that he is told by a friend from Washington County of the finding there, in the sinking of a salt-well, "of the hip-bone of the incognitum, the socket of which was about eight inches in diameter." Such things were peculiarly interesting to Jefferson, and Madison was too devoted a friend to him to leave them unnoticed. But they were hardly less interesting to himself, though he had not much of Jefferson's habit of scientific investigation. That "the potter's ware in the style of the Indians" should be found so deeply buried only seems to him "singular;" nor, indeed, is there any record, so far as we know, that this particular fact was any more suggestive to Jefferson, though apparently so likely to arouse his inquiring mind to seek for some satisfactory explanation. But his geological notions were too positive to admit even of a doubt as to the age of man. Supposing a Creator, he assumed that "he created the earth at once, nearly in the state in which we see it, fit for the preservation of the beings he placed on it." Theorist as he was himself, he had little patience with the other theorists who were already beginning to discover in the structure of the earth the evidence of successive geological eras. The different strata of rocks and their inclination gave him no trouble. He explained them all by the assumption that "rock grows, and it seems that it grows in layers in every direction, as the branches of trees grow in all directions." That evidences of the existence of man should be found with a superimposed weight of earth seventy feet in thickness would present to him no difficulty. If the fact had specially aroused his attention he would have explained it in some ingenious way as the result of accident.

CHAPTER VI

PUBLIC DISTURBANCES AND ANXIETIES

In February, 1787, Madison again took a seat in Congress. It was an anxious period. Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts had assumed rather formidable possibilities, and seemed not unlikely to spread to other States. Till this storm should blow over, the important business of Congress was to raise money and troops; in reality, to go to the help of Massachusetts, if need should be, though the object ostensibly was to protect a handful of people on the frontier against the Indians. It was a striking instance of the imbecility of the government under the Articles of Confederation, that it could only undertake to suppress rebellion in a State under the pretense of doing something else which came within the law. Massachusetts, it is true, was quite able to deal with her insurgents; but when Congress convened it was not known in New York that Lincoln had dispersed the main body of them at Petersham. Nevertheless, a like difficulty might arise at any moment in any other of the States, where the strength to meet it might be quite inadequate.

Madison's ideal still was, the Union before the States, and for the sake of the States; the whole before the parts, to save the parts; the binding the fagot together that the sticks might not be lost. "Our situation," he wrote to Edmund Randolph in February, "is becoming every day more and more critical. No money comes into the federal treasury; no respect is paid to the federal authority; and people of reflection unanimously agree that the existing Confederacy is tottering to its foundation. Many individuals of weight, particularly in the eastern district, are suspected of leaning toward monarchy. Other individuals predict a partition of the States into two or more confederacies. It is pretty certain that if some radical amendment of the single one cannot be devised and introduced, one or the other of these revolutions, the latter no doubt, will take place."

It is not impossible that Madison himself may have had some faith in this suspicion that "individuals of weight in the eastern district" were inclined to a monarchy. For such suspicion, however there could be little real foundation. There were, doubtless, men of weight who thought and said that monarchy was better than anarchy. There were, doubtless, impatient men then who thought and said, as there are impatient men now who think and say, that the rule of a king is better than the rule of the people. But there was no disloyalty to government by the people among those who only maintained that the English in America must draw from the common heritage of English institutions and English law the material wherewith to build up the foundations of a new nation. No intelligent and candid man doubts now that they were wise; nor would it have been long doubted then, had it not so speedily become manifest that, if the stigma of "British" was once affixed to a political party, any appeal from popular prejudice to reason and common sense was hopeless.

There were a few persons who would have done away with the divisions of States and establish in their place a central government. Those most earnest in maintaining the autonomy of States declared that such a government was, as Luther Martin of Maryland called it, of "a monarchical nature." What else could that be but a monarchy? An insinuation took on the form of a logical deduction and became a popular fallacy. Yet those most earnest for a central government only sought to establish a stable rule in place of no rule at all; or, worse still, of the tyranny of an ignorant and vicious mob under the outraged name of democracy, into which there was danger of drifting. Whether their plan was wise or foolish, it did not mean a monarchy. Even of Shays's misguided followers Jefferson said: "I believe you may be assured that an idea or desire of returning to anything like their ancient government never entered into their heads." As Madison knew and said, the real danger was that the States would divide into two confederacies, and only by a new and wiser and stronger union could that calamity be averted.

To gain the assent of most of the States to a convention was surmounting only the least of the difficulties. Three weeks before the time of meeting Madison wrote: "The nearer the crisis approaches, the more I tremble for the issue. The necessity of gaining the concurrence of the convention in some system that will answer the purpose, the subsequent approbation of Congress, and the final sanction of the States, present a series of chances which would inspire despair in any case where the alternative was less formidable." He said, in the first month of the session of that body, that "the States were divided into different interests, not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States. It did not lie between the large and small States. It lay between the Northern and Southern."

During the earlier weeks of this session of Congress, and, indeed, for some months before, events had made so manifest this difference of interest, coincident with the difference in latitude, that there seemed little ground for hope that any good would come out of a constitutional convention. The old question of the navigation of the Mississippi was again agitated. The South held her right to that river to be of much more value than anything she could gain by a closer union with the North, and she was quite ready to go to war with Spain in defense of it. On the other hand, the Northern States were quite indifferent to the navigation of the Mississippi, and not disposed apparently to make any exertion or sacrifice to secure it. Just now they were anxious to secure a commercial treaty with Spain; but Spain insisted, as a preliminary condition, that the United States should relinquish all claim to navigation upon a river whose mouths were within Spanish territory. In the Northern mind there was no doubt of the value of trade with Spain; and there was a good deal of doubt whether there was anything worth contending for in the right to sail upon a river running through a wilderness where, as yet, there were few inhabitants, and hardly any trade worth talking about. More than that, there was unquestionably a not uncommon belief at the North and East that the settlement and prosperity of the West would be at the expense of the Atlantic States. Perhaps that view of the matter was not loudly insisted upon; but many were none the less persuaded that, if population was attracted westward by the hope of acquiring rich and cheap lands, prosperity and power would go with it. At any rate, those of this way of thinking were not inclined to forego a certain good for that which would profit them nothing, and might do them lasting harm.

For these reasons, spoken and unspoken, the Northern members of Congress were at first quite willing, for the sake of a commercial treaty, to concede to Spain the exclusive control of the Mississippi. But to pacify the South it was proposed that the concession to Spain should be for only five and twenty years. If at the end of that period the navigation of the Mississippi should be worth contending for, the question could be reopened. The South was, of course, rather exasperated than pacified by such a proposition. The navigation of the river had not only a certain value to them now, but it was theirs by right, and that was reason enough for not parting with it even for a limited period. Concessions now would make the reassertion of the right the more difficult by and by. If it must be fought for, it would lessen the chance of success to put off the fighting five and twenty years. Indeed, it could not be put off, for war was already begun in a small way. The Spaniards had seized American boats on trading voyages down the river, and the Americans had retaliated upon some petty Spanish settlements. Spain, moreover, seemed at first no more inclined to listen to compromise than the South was.

England watched this controversy with interest. She had no expectation of recovering for herself the Floridas, which she had lost in the war of the Revolution, and had finally ceded to Spain by the treaty of 1783; but she was quite willing to see that power get into trouble on the Mississippi question, and more than willing that it should threaten the peace and union of the States. Her own boundary line west of the Alleghanies might possibly be extended far south of the Great Lakes, if the Northern and Southern States should divide into two confederacies; but, apart from any lust of territory, she rejoiced at anything that threatened to check the growth of her late colonies.

Fortunately, however, the question was disposed of, before the Constitutional Convention met at Philadelphia, by the failure to secure a treaty. The Spanish minister, Guardoqui, consented, at length, after long resistance, to accept as a compromise the navigation of the river for five and twenty years; but Mr. Jay, who was willing, could he have had his way, to concede anything, found at that stage of the negotiations he could not command votes enough in Congress to secure a treaty even in that modified form. Hitherto he had relied upon a resolution passed by Congress in August, 1786, by the vote of seven Northern States against five Southern. This, it was assumed, repealed a resolution of the year before, and authorized the secretary to make a treaty. The resolution of the year before, August, 1785, had been passed by the votes of nine States, and was in confirmation of a provision of the Articles of Confederation declaring that "no treaties with foreign powers should be entered into but by the assent of nine States." The minority contended that such a resolution could not be repealed by the vote of only seven States, for that would be to violate a fundamental condition of the Articles of Confederation. It is easy to see now that there ought not to have been a difference among honorable men on such a point as that. Nevertheless Mr. Jay, supported by some of the strongest Northern men, held that the votes of seven States could be made, in a roundabout way, to authorize an act which the Constitution declared should never be lawful except with the assent of nine States. So the secretary went on with his negotiations and came to terms with the Spanish minister.

In April the secretary was called upon to report to Congress what was the position of these negotiations. Then it first publicly appeared that a treaty was actually agreed upon which gave up the right to the Mississippi for a quarter of a century. But it was also speedily made plain by various parliamentary motions that the seven votes, which the friends of such a treaty had relied upon, had fallen from seven—even could that number in the end have been of use—to, at best, four. The New Jersey delegates had been instructed not to consent to the surrender of the American right to the use of the Mississippi; a new delegate from Pennsylvania had changed the vote of that State; and Rhode Island had also gone over to the other side. "It was considered, on the whole," wrote Madison, "that the project for shutting the Mississippi was at an end."

These details are not unimportant. Forty-five years afterward Madison wrote that "his main object, in returning to Congress at this time, was to bring about, if possible, the canceling of Mr. Jay's project for shutting the Mississippi." Probably it had occurred to nobody then that within less than twenty years the Province of Louisiana would belong to the United States, when their right to the navigation of the river could be no longer disputed. But so long as both its banks from the thirty-first degree of latitude southward to the Gulf remained foreign territory, it was of the last importance to the Southern States, whose territory extended to the Mississippi, that the right of way should not be surrendered. If a treaty with Spain could be carried that gave up this right, and the Southern States should be compelled to choose between the loss of the Mississippi and the loss of the Union, there could be little doubt as to what their choice would be. It was not a question to be postponed till after the Philadelphia Convention had convened; if not disposed of before, the convention might as well not meet.

Madison's letters, while the question was pending, show great anxiety. He was glad to know that the South was of one mind on this subject and would not yield an inch. He was quite confident that his own State would take the lead, as she soon did, in the firm avowal of Southern opinion. But he rejoiced that the question did not come up in the Virginia legislature till after the act was passed to send delegates to the Philadelphia Convention. That he looked upon as a point gained, and the delegates were presently appointed; but he still despaired of any good coming of the convention, unless "Mr. Jay's project for shutting the Mississippi" could be first got rid of.

In a recent work[9] Mr. Madison is represented as having "struck a bargain" with the Kentucky delegates to the Virginia Assembly, agreeing to speak on behalf of a petition relating to the Mississippi question, provided the delegates from Kentucky—then a part of Virginia—would vote for the representation of Virginia at Philadelphia. A "bargain" implies an exchange of one thing for another, and Madison had no convictions in favor of closing the Mississippi to exchange for a service rendered on behalf of a measure for which he wished to secure votes. Moreover, no bargain was necessary. It was not easy to find anybody in Virginia who needed to be persuaded that the right to the Mississippi must not be surrendered. Madison wrote to Monroe in October, 1786, that it would "be defended by the legislature with as much zeal as could be wished. Indeed, the only danger is that too much resentment may be indulged by many against the federal councils." His only apprehension was lest the Mississippi question should come up in the Assembly before the report from the Annapolis Convention should be disposed of, for if that were accepted the appointment of delegates to Philadelphia was assured. "I hope," he wrote to Washington in November, "the report will be called for before the business of the Mississippi begins to ferment." It happened as he wished. "The recommendation from Annapolis," he wrote again a week later, "in favor of a general revision of the federal system was unanimously agreed to" (the emphasis is his own). He afterward reported to Jefferson "that the project for bartering the Mississippi to Spain was brought before the Assembly after the preceding measure had been adopted." There was neither delay nor difficulty in securing the unanimous consent of the Assembly to resolutions instructing the members of Congress to oppose any concession to Spain. But Madison's anxiety was not in the least relieved by the speedy appointment of delegates to the Philadelphia Convention; for, he wrote presently to Washington, "I am entirely convinced, from what I observe here (at Richmond), that, unless the project of Congress can be reversed, the hopes of carrying this State into a proper federal system will be demolished." He had already said, in the same letter, that the resolutions on the Mississippi question had been "agreed to unanimously in the House of Delegates," and three days before the letter was written the delegates to Philadelphia had been appointed.

CHAPTER VII

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

Mr. Madison is called "the Father of the Constitution." A paper written by him was laid before his colleagues of Virginia, before the meeting of the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, and was made the basis of the "Virginia plan," as it was called, out of which the Constitution was evolved. In another way his name is so identified with it that one cannot be forgotten so long as the other is remembered. From that full and faithful report of the proceedings of the convention, in which his own part was so active and conspicuous, we know most that we do or ever can know of the perplexities and trials, the concessions and triumphs, the acts of wisdom and the acts of weakness, of that body of men whose coming together time has shown to have been one of the important events in the history of mankind.

Then it is also true that no man had worked harder, perhaps none had worked so hard, to bring the public mind to a serious consideration of affairs and a recognition of the necessity of reorganizing the government, if the States were to be held together. Never, it seemed, had men better reason to be satisfied with the result of their labors when, a few months later, the new Constitution was accepted by all the States. Yet the time was not far distant when even Madison would be in doubt as to the character of this new bond of union, and as to what sort of government had been secured by it. Nor till he had been dead near thirty years was it to be determined what union under the Constitution really meant; nor till three quarters of a century after the adoption of that instrument was the more perfect union formed, justice established, domestic tranquillity insured, the general welfare promoted, and the blessings of liberty secured to all the people, which by that great charter it was intended, in 1787, to ordain and establish. All the difficulties, which they who framed it escaped by their work, were as nothing to those which it entailed upon their descendants.

Two parties went into the convention. On one point, of course, they were agreed, else they would never have come together at all,—that a united government under the Articles of Confederation was a failure, and, unless some remedy should be speedily devised, States with common local interests would gravitate into separate and perhaps antagonistic nationalities. But the differences between these two parties were radical, and for a time seemed insurmountable. One proposed simply to repair the Articles of Confederation as they might overhaul a machine that was out of gear; the other proposed to form an altogether new Constitution. One wanted a merely federal government; not, however, meaning by that term what the other party—soon, nevertheless, to be known as Federalists—were striving for, but a confederation of States, each independent of all the rest and supreme in its own right, while consenting to unite with the rest in a limited government for the administration of certain common interests.[10]

This idea of the independence of the States was a survival of the old colonial system, when each colony under its distinct relation to the crown had attained a growth of its own with its separate interests. Each of these colonies had become a State. The Revolution had secured to each, it was maintained, a separate independence, achieved, it was true, by united efforts, but not therefore binding them together as a single nation. It was held as a legitimate result of that doctrine that each State, not the people of the State, whether many or few, should be represented by the same number of votes in a federal government as they were under the Articles of Confederation, because such a government was a union of States, not of a people.

All men, it was argued,—going back to a state of nature,—are equally free and independent; and when a government is formed every man has an equal share by natural right in its formation and in its subsequent conduct. While numbers are few, every member of the State exercises his individual right in person, and none can rightfully do more than this, however wise, or powerful, or rich he may be. But when government by the whole body of the people becomes cumbersome and inconvenient through increase of numbers, the individual citizen loses none of his rights by intrusting their exercise to representatives, in choosing and instructing whom all have an equal voice. So when States are united in a confederacy each State has the same relation to that government that individuals have to each other in a single State. They are free and equal, and none has a larger share of rights in the confederacy because its people are more numerous, or because it is richer or more powerful, than the rest. In such a confederacy it is not the individual citizen who is to be represented, but the individual State. In such a confederacy there would be the same representation for a State, say of ten thousand inhabitants, as for one of fifty thousand. This, it was maintained, preserved equality of suffrage in the equality of States; while the representation of the individual citizens of the States would be in reality inequality of suffrage, because the autonomy of the State would be lost sight of. If in such a case it were asked what had become of the rights which the majority of forty thousand had inherited from nature, the answer was that those rights were preserved and represented in the state government. The difficulty, nevertheless, remained: how to reconcile in practice this doctrine of the equal rights of States, where there might be a minority of persons, with the actual rights of the whole people where, according to the underlying democratic doctrine, the good of the whole must be decided by the larger number.

Those who proposed only to amend the old Articles of Confederation, and opposed a new Constitution, objected that a government formed under such a Constitution would be not a federal but a national government. Luther Martin said, when he returned to Maryland, that the delegates "appeared totally to have forgot the business for which we were sent.... We had not been sent to form a government over the inhabitants of America considered as individuals.... That the system of government we were intrusted to prepare was a government over these thirteen States, but that in our proceedings we adopted principles which would be right and proper only on the supposition that there were no state governments at all, but that all the inhabitants of this extensive continent were in their individual capacity, without government, and in a state of nature." He added that "in the whole system there was but one federal feature, the appointment of the senators by the States in their sovereign capacity, that is, by their legislatures, and the equality of suffrage in that branch; but it was said that this feature was only federal in appearance."

The Senate, the second house as it was called in the convention, was in part created, it is needless to say, to meet, or rather in obedience to, reasoning like this. There was almost nobody who would have been willing to abandon the state governments, as there was next to nobody who wanted a monarchy. "We were eternally troubled," Martin said, "with arguments and precedents from the British government." He could not get beyond the fixed notion that those whom he opposed were determined to establish "one general government over this extensive continent, of a monarchical nature." If he, and those who agreed with him, sincerely believed this to be true, it was natural enough that the frequent allusions to British precedents, as wise rules for American guidance in constructing a government, should be looked upon as an unmistakable hankering after lost flesh-pots. Should the state governments be swept away, it might be that, in time of danger from without or of peril from internal dissensions, the country, under "a government of a monarchical nature," might drift back to its old allegiance. If those who feared, or said they feared, this were not quite sincere, the temptation was almost irresistible to use such arguments to arouse popular prejudice against political opponents. It is curious that Madison seemed quite unconscious of how much the frequent allusions in his articles in "The Federalist" to the British Constitution might strengthen these accusations of the opposition; while he half believed that the same thing in others showed in them a leaning toward England, from which he knew that he himself was quite free.

The Luther Martin protestants were too radical to remain in the convention to the end, when they saw that such a confederacy as they wanted was impossible. But there were not many who went the length they did in believing that a strong central government was necessarily the destruction of the state governments. Still fewer were those who would have brought this about if they could. That the rights of the States must be preserved was the general opinion and determination, and it was not difficult to do this by limiting the powers of the higher government, or federal as it soon came to be called, and by the organization of the second house, the Senate, in which all the States had an equal representation. The smaller States were satisfied with this concession, and the larger were willing to make it, not only for the sake of the Union, but because of the just estimate in which they held the rights belonging to all the States alike. The real difficulty, as Madison said in the debate on that question, and as he repeated again and again after that question was settled, was not between the larger and smaller States, but between the North and the South; between those States that held slaves and those that had none.

Slavery in the Constitution, which has given so much trouble to the Abolitionists of this century, and indeed to everybody else, gave quite as much in the last century to those who put it there. Many of the wisest and best men of the time, Southerners as well as Northerners, and among them Madison, were opposed to slavery. They could see little good in it, hardly even any compensation for the existence of a system so full of evil. There was hardly a State in the Union at that time that had not its emancipation society; and there was hardly a man of any eminence in the country who was not an officer, or at least a member, of such a society. Everywhere north of South Carolina, slavery was looked upon as a misfortune which it was exceedingly desirable to be free from at the earliest possible moment; everywhere north of Mason and Dixon's line, measures had already been taken, or were certain soon to be taken, to put an end to it; and by the ordinance for the government of all the territory north of the Ohio River it was absolutely prohibited by Congress in the same year in which the Constitutional Congress met.

But it was, nevertheless, a thing to the continued existence of which the anti-slavery people of that time could consent without any violation of conscience. Bad as it was, unwise, wasteful, cruel, a mockery of every pretense of respect for the rights of man, they did not believe it to be absolutely wicked. If they had so believed, let us hope they would have washed their hands of it. As it was, it was only a question of expediency whether, for the sake of the Union, they should protect the system of slavery, and give to the slaveholders, as slaveholders, a certain degree of political power. To refuse to admit a slaveholding State into the Union did not occur, probably, to the most earnest opponent of the system; for that would have been simply to say that there should be no Union. That was what Madison meant in saying so repeatedly that the real difficulty in the way was, not the difference between the large and the small States, but the difference between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States. If there could be no conciliation on that point there could be no Union.

Some hoped, perhaps, rather than believed, that slavery was likely to disappear ere long at the South as it was disappearing at the North. It is an impeachment of their intelligence, however, to suppose that they relied much upon any such hope. The simple truth is that slavery was then, as it continued to be for three quarters of a century longer, the paramount interest of the South. To withstand or disregard it was not merely difficult, but was to brave immediate possible dangers and sufferings, which are never voluntarily encountered except in obedience to the highest sense of duty; or to meet a necessity, from which there was no manly way of escape. The sense of absolute duty was wanting; the necessity, it was hoped, might be avoided by concessions. It can only be said for those who made them that they did not see what fruitful seeds of future trouble they were sowing in the Constitution.

CHAPTER VIII

"THE COMPROMISES"

The question with the North was, how far could it yield; with the South, how far could it encroach. It turned mainly on representation,—on "the unimportant anomaly," as Mr. George Ticknor Curtis calls it in his "History of the Constitution," "of a representation of men without political rights or social privileges." However much they differed upon the subject in the convention, there was nobody then and there who regarded the question as "unimportant;" nor was there a political event to happen for the coming eighty years that it did not influence and generally govern. There were some who maintained at first that the slave population should not be represented at all. Hamilton proposed in the first days of the convention "that the rights of suffrage in the national legislature ought to be proportioned to the number of free inhabitants." Madison was willing to concede this in one branch of the legislature, provided that in the representation in the other house the slaves were counted as free inhabitants. The constitution of the Senate subsequently disposed of that proposition.

But why should slaves be represented at all? "They are not free agents," said Patterson, a delegate to the convention from New Jersey; they "have no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring property, but, on the contrary, are themselves property, and, like other property, entirely at the will of the master. Has a man in Virginia a number of votes in proportion to the number of his slaves? And if negroes are not represented in the States to which they belong, why should they be represented in the general government?... If a meeting of the people was actually to take place in a slave State, would the slaves vote? They would not. Why, then, should they be represented in a federal government?" There could be but one reply, but that was one which it would not have been wise to make. It was slave property that was to be represented, and this would not be submitted to among slaveholders as against each other, while yet they were a unit in insisting upon it in a union with those who were not slaveholders. Among themselves slavery needed no protection; their safety was in equality. But to their great interest every non-slaveholder was, in the nature of things, an enemy; and prudence required that the power either to vote him down or to buy him up should never be wanting. It was as much a matter of instinct as of deliberation, for love of life is the first law. The truth was covered up in Madison's specious assertion that "every peculiar interest, whether in any class of citizens or any description of States, ought to be secured as far as possible." The only "peculiar" interest, however, belonging either to citizens or States, that was imbedded in the Constitution, was slavery.

So Wilson of Pennsylvania asked: "Are they [the slaves] admitted as citizens—then why are they not admitted on an equality with white citizens? Are they admitted as property—then why is not other property admitted into the computation?" He was willing, however, to concede that it was a difficulty to be "overcome by the necessity of compromise."

Never, probably, in the history of legislation, was there a more serious question debated. Compromise is ordinarily understood to mean an adjustment by mutual concessions, where there are rights on both sides. Here it meant whether the side which had no shadow of right whatever to that which it demanded would consent to take a little less than the whole. It was the kind of compromise made between the bandit and his victim when the former decides that he will not put himself to the trouble of shooting the other, and will even leave him his shirt. It was not difficult to understand that horses and cattle could be justly counted only where property was to be the basis of representation. Yet the slaves, who were counted, were, in the eye of the law, either personal property or real estate, and were no more represented as citizens than if they also had gone upon all fours. Their enumeration, nevertheless, was carried, and it so increased the representative power of their masters that inequality of citizenship became the fundamental principle of the government. This, of course, was to form an oligarchy, not a democracy. Practically the government was put in the hands of a class, and there it remained from the moment of the adoption of the Constitution to the rebellion of 1860; while that class, including those of so little consequence as to own only a slave or two, in its best estate, probably never exceeded ten per centum of the whole people.

There was, if one may venture to say so, a singular confusion in the minds of the venerable fathers of the republic on this subject. They could not quite get rid of the notion that the slaves, being human, ought to be included in the enumeration of population, notwithstanding that their enumeration as citizens must necessarily disappear in their representation as chattels. Slaves, as slaves, were the wealth of the South, as ships, for example, were the wealth of the North; but, being human, the mind was not shocked at having the slaves reckoned as population in fixing the basis of representation, though in reality they only represented the masters' ownership. But nobody would have been at a loss to see the absurdity of counting three fifths of the Northern ships as population. Even a Webster Whig of sixty-five years later could, perhaps, have understood that that was something more than an "unimportant anomaly." There was no clearer-headed man in the convention than Gouverneur Morris; yet he said that he was "compelled to declare himself reduced to the dilemma of doing injustice to the Southern States or to human nature, and he must do it to the former." C. C. Pinckney of South Carolina declared that he was "alarmed" at such an avowal as that. Yet had the question been one of counting three fifths of the Northern ships in the enumeration of population, Morris would have discovered no "dilemma," and Pinckney nothing to be "alarmed" at. So palpable an outrage on common sense would have been merely laughed at by both.

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney

In reply to Pinckney, however, Morris grew bolder. "It was high time," he said, "to speak out." He came there "to form a compact for the good of America. He hoped and believed that all would enter into such compact. If they would not, he was ready to join with any States that would. But as the compact was to be voluntary, it is in vain for the Eastern States to insist on what the Southern States will never agree to. It is equally vain for the latter to require what the other States can never admit, and he verily believed the people of Pennsylvania will never agree to a representation of negroes;" of negroes, he meant, counted as human beings, not for their own representation, but, as ships might be counted, for the increased representation of those who held them as property. The next day he "spoke out" still more plainly. "If negroes," he said, "were to be viewed as inhabitants, ... they ought to be added in their entire number, and not in the proportion of three fifths. If as property, the word 'wealth' was right,"—as the basis, that is, of representation. The distinction that had been set up by Madison and others between the Northern and Southern States he considered as heretical and groundless. But it was persisted in, and "he saw that the Southern gentlemen will not be satisfied unless they see the way open to their gaining a majority in the public councils.... Either this distinction [between the North and the South] is fictitious or real; if fictitious, let it be dismissed, and let us proceed with due confidence. If it be real, instead of attempting to blend incompatible things, let us at once take a friendly leave of each other."

But could they take "a friendly leave of each other"? Should a union be secured on the terms the South offered? or should it be declined, as Morris proposed, if it could not be a union of equality? The next day Madison again set forth the real issue, quietly but unmistakably. "It seemed now," he said, "to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lay, not between the large and small, but between the Northern and Southern States. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed the line of discrimination." There is sometimes great power, as he well knew, in firm reiteration. So long as slavery lasted, the lesson he then inculcated was never forgotten. Thenceforward, as then, "the line of discrimination," in Southern politics, lay with "slavery and its consequences." One side would abate nothing of its demands; there could be no "friendly leave" unless the determination, on the other side, to overcome the desire for union and take the consequences was equally firm.

When the question again came up, however, Morris had not lost heart. His talk was the talk of a modern abolitionist:—

"He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery. It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of Heaven on the States where it prevailed. Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other States having slaves. Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery.... Proceed southwardly, and every step you take through the great regions of slavery presents a desert increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings. Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens, and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The houses in this city [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves who cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.... And what is the proposed compensation to the Northern States for a sacrifice of every principle of right, of every impulse of humanity? They are to bind themselves to march their militia for the defense of the Southern States, for their defense against those very slaves of whom they complain. They must supply vessels and seamen in case of foreign attack. The legislature will have indefinite power to tax them by excises and duties on imports, both of which will fall heavier on them than on the Southern inhabitants; for the Bohea tea used by a Northern freeman will pay more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave, which consists of nothing more than his physical subsistence and the rags that cover his nakedness.... Let it not be said that direct taxation is to be proportioned to representation. It is idle to suppose that the general government can stretch its hand directly into the pockets of the people scattered over so vast a country.... He would sooner submit himself to a tax for paying for all the negroes in the United States than saddle posterity with such a Constitution."

So much of this as was not already fact was prophecy. Yet not many weeks later this impassioned orator put his name to the Constitution, though it had grown meanwhile into larger pro-slavery proportions. There was undoubtedly some sympathy with him among a few of the members; but the general feeling was more truly expressed a few days later by Rutledge of South Carolina, in the debate on the continuance of the African slave trade. "Religion and humanity," he said, "had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations. The true question at present is, whether the Southern States shall or shall not be parties to the Union. If the Northern States consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase of slaves, which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers." The response came from Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth saying: "Let every State import what it pleases. The morality or wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to the States themselves. What enriches a part enriches the whole,"—especially Newport and its adjacent coasts, he might have added, with its trade to the African coast.

But a Virginian, George Mason, had another tone. He called the traffic "infernal." "Slavery," he went on, "discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities."

These were warnings worth heeding. But Ellsworth retorted with a sneer: "As he had never owned a slave, he could not judge of the effect of slavery on character." He said, however, that, "if it was to be considered in a moral light, we ought to go farther, and free those already in the country." But, so far from that, he thought it would be "unjust toward South Carolina and Georgia," in whose "sickly rice swamps" negroes died so fast, should there be any intermeddling to prevent the importation of fresh Africans to labor, and, of course, to perish there. Perhaps it was this shrewd argument of the Connecticut delegate that suggested, half a century afterward, to a Mississippi agricultural society, the economical calculation that it was cheaper to use up a gang of negroes every few years, and supply its place by a fresh gang from Virginia, than rely upon the natural increase that would follow their humane treatment as men and women. His colleague, Roger Sherman, came to Ellsworth's aid. It would be, he thought, the duty of the general government to prohibit the foreign trade in slaves, and, should this be left in its power, it would probably be done. But he would not, if the Southern States made it the condition of consenting to the Constitution that the trade should be protected, leave it in the power of the general government to do that which he acknowledged that it should and probably would do.

Delegates from Georgia and the Carolinas declared that to be the condition,—among them C. C. Pinckney of South Carolina. "He should consider," he said, "a rejection of the clause as an exclusion of South Carolina from the Union." Nevertheless he said to the people at home, when they came together to consider the Constitution: "We are so weak that by ourselves we could not form a union strong enough for the purpose of effectually protecting each other. Without union with the other States, South Carolina must soon fall." On the part of that State it had been a game of brag all along. The first lesson in the South Carolinian policy was given in the Constitutional Convention. Of the result, this was Pinckney's summing up to his constituents:—

"By this settlement we have secured an unlimited importation of negroes for twenty years; nor is it declared that the importation shall be then stopped; it may be continued. We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them, for no such authority is granted.... We have obtained a right to recover our slaves, in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before. In short, considering all circumstances, we have made the best terms, for the security of this species of property, it was in our power to make. We would have made better if we could, but on the whole I do not think them bad."

A more moderate and a more significant statement could hardly have been made.

On the foreign slave trade Madison had little to say, but, like most of the Southern delegates north of the Carolinas, he was opposed to it. "Twenty years," he said, "will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the American character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution." The words are a little ambiguous, though he is his own reporter. But what he meant evidently was, that any protection of the trade would dishonor the nation; for at another point of the debate, on the same day, he said that "he thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men." Such property he was anxious to protect as the great Southern interest, so long as it lasted; but he was not willing to strengthen it by permitting the continuance of the African slave trade for twenty years longer under the sanction of the Constitution. But he held it to be, as he wrote in "The Federalist," "a great point gained in favor of humanity that a period of twenty years may terminate forever within these States a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy." He added, "The attempt that had been made to pervert this clause into an objection against the Constitution, by representing it as a criminal toleration of an illicit practice," was a misconstruction which he did not think deserving of an answer.

It was, in fact, a bargain which he had not approved of, and did not now probably care to talk about. It was made at the suggestion of Gouverneur Morris, who moved that the foreign slave trade, a navigation act, and a duty on exports be referred for consideration to a committee. "These things," he said, "may form a bargain among the Northern and Southern States." When the committee reported in favor of the slave trade, C. C. Pinckney proposed that its limitation should be extended from 1800 to 1808. Gorham of Massachusetts seconded the motion, and it was carried by the addition of the votes of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut to those of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

The committee also reported the substitution of a majority vote for that of two thirds in legislation relating to commerce. The concession was made without much difficulty, a Georgia delegate and three of the four South Carolina delegates favoring it, two of the latter frankly saying they did so to gratify New England. It was, C. C. Pinckney said, "the true interest of the Southern States to have no regulation of commerce;" but he assented to this proposition, and his constituents "would be reconciled to this liberality," because, among other considerations, of "the liberal conduct [of the New England States] towards the views of South Carolina." There was no question of the meaning of this sudden avowal of friendly feeling. Jefferson relates in his "Ana," on the authority of George Mason, a member of the convention, that Georgia and South Carolina had "struck up a bargain with the three New England States, that if they would admit slaves for twenty years, the two southernmost States would join in changing the clause which required two thirds of the legislature in any vote."

The settlement of these questions was an opportune moment for the introduction of that relating to fugitive slaves. Butler of South Carolina immediately proposed a section which should secure their return to their masters, and it was passed without a word. As Pinckney said in the passage already quoted, when he went back to report to his constituents, "it is a right to recover our slaves, in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before."

It is notable how complete and final a settlement of the slavery question "these compromises," as they were called, seemed to be to those who made them. They were meant to be, as Mr. Madison called them, "adjustments of the different interests of different parts of the country," and being once agreed upon they were considered as having the binding force and stability of a contract. The evils of slavery were set forth as an element in the negotiation, but no question of essential morality was raised that brought the system within the category of forbidden wrong. Whatever results might follow would be limited, it was thought, by the terms of the contract; whereas, in fact, the actual results were not foreseen, and could not be guarded against, except by the refusal to enter into any contract whatever.

On all other questions involving political principles,—the just relations of the federal government and the governments of the States; the relations between the larger and the smaller States; the regulation of the functions of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial departments of government,—on all these the framers of the Constitution brought to bear the profoundest wisdom. When one reflects upon the magnitude and character of the work, Madison's conclusion seems hardly extravagant, that "adding to these considerations the natural diversity of human opinions on all new and complicated subjects, it is impossible to consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle." There were, nevertheless, the gravest and most anxious doubts how far the Constitution would stand the test of time; yet as a system of government for a nation of freemen it remains to this day practically unchanged. But where its architects thought themselves wisest they were weakest. That which they thought they had settled forever was the one thing which they did not settle. Of all the "adjustments" of the Constitution, slavery was precisely that one which was not adjusted.

Madison's responsibility for this result was that of every other delegate,—no more and no less. Neither he nor they, whether more or less opposed to slavery, saw in it a system so subversive of the rights of man that no just government should tolerate it. That was reserved for a later generation, and even that was slow to learn. To the fathers it was, at worst, only an unfortunate and unhappy social condition, which it would be well to be rid of if this could be done without too much sacrifice; but otherwise, to be submitted to, like any other misfortune.

While it did exist, however, Madison believed it should be protected, though not encouraged, as a Southern interest. The question resolved itself into one of expediency,—of union or disunion. What disunion would be, he knew, or thought he knew. Perhaps he was mistaken. Disunion, had it come then, might have been the way to a true union. "We are so weak," said C. C. Pinckney, "that by ourselves we could not form a union strong enough for the purpose of effectually protecting each other. Without union with the other States, South Carolina must soon fall." But he was careful to say this at home, not in Philadelphia. In the convention, Madison wrote a month after it adjourned, "South Carolina and Georgia were inflexible on the point of the slaves." What was to be the union which that inflexibility carried was not foreseen. It was the children's teeth that were to be set on edge.

CHAPTER IX

ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION

Madison's labors for the Constitution did not cease when the convention adjourned, although he was not at that moment in a hopeful frame of mind in regard to it. Within a week of the adjournment he wrote to Jefferson: "I hazard an opinion that the plan, should it be adopted, will neither effectually answer its national object, nor prevent the local mischiefs which excite disgusts against the state governments."

But this feeling seems to have soon passed away. Perhaps, when he devoted himself to a careful study of what had been done, he saw, in looking at it as a whole, how just and true it was in its fair proportions. He now diligently sought to prove how certainly the Constitution would answer its purpose; how wisely all its parts were adjusted; how successfully the obstacles to a perfect union of the States had been, as he thought, overcome; how carefully the rights of the separate States had been guarded, while the needed general government would be secured. Whether there should be an American nation or not depended, as he had believed for years, upon whether a national Constitution could be agreed upon. Now that it was framed he believed that upon its adoption depended whether there should be, or should not be, a nation. In September, as he wrote to Jefferson, he was in doubt; in February he wrote to Pendleton: "I have for some time been persuaded that the question on which the proposed Constitution must turn is the simple one, whether the Union shall or shall not be continued. There is, in my opinion, no middle ground to be taken."

Those who would have called a second convention to revise the labors of the first had no sympathy from him. He not only doubted if the work could be done so well again; he doubted if it could be done at all. With him, it was this Constitution or none. "Every man," he said in "The Federalist," referring to a picture he had just drawn of the perils of disunion,—"every man who loves peace, every man who loves his country, every man who loves liberty, ought to have it ever before his eyes, that he may cherish in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America, and be able to set a due value on the means of preserving it." This "means" was the Constitution.

Of the eighty papers of "The Federalist" he wrote twenty-nine; Hamilton writing forty-six, and Jay only five. These famous essays, of wider repute than any other American book, are yet more generally accepted upon faith than upon knowledge. But at that time, when the new Constitution was in the mind and on the tongue of every thoughtful man, they were eagerly read as they followed each other rapidly in the columns of a New York newspaper. They were an armory, wherein all who entered into the controversy could find such weapons as they could best handle. What governments had been, what governments ought to be, and what the political union of these American States would be under their new Constitution, were questions on which the writers of these papers undertook to answer all reasonable inquiries, and to silence all cavils. Madison would undoubtedly have written more than his two fifths of them, had he not been called upon early in March to return to Virginia; for the work was of the deepest interest to him, and the popularity of the papers would have stimulated to exertion one as indolent as he was industrious.

But the canvass for the election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention of Virginia called him home. He had been nominated as the representative of his county, and his friends had urged him to return before the election, for there was reason to fear that the majority was on the wrong side. Henry, Mason, Randolph, Lee, and others among the most influential men of Virginia, were opposed to the Constitution. There must be somebody in the convention to meet strong men like these, and Madison was urged to take the stump and canvass for his own election. Even this he was willing to do at this crisis, if need be, though he said it would be at the sacrifice of every private inclination, and of the rule which hitherto from the beginning of his public career he had strictly adhered to,—never to ask, directly or indirectly, for votes for himself.

It is quite possible, even quite probable, that Mr. Madison had little of that gift which has always passed for eloquence, and is, indeed, eloquence of a certain kind. If we may trust the reports of his contemporaries, though he wanted some of the graces of oratory, he was not wanting in the power of winning and convincing. His arguments were often, if not always, prepared with care. If there was no play of fancy, there was no forgetfulness of facts. If there was lack of imagination, there was none of historical illustration, when the subject admitted it. If manner was forgotten, method was not. His aim was to prove and to hold fast; to make the wrong clear, and to put the right in its place; to appeal to reason, not to passion, nor to prejudice; to try his cause by the light of clear logic, hard facts, and sound learning; to convince his hearers of the truth, as he believed in it, not to take their judgment captive by surprise with harmonious modulation and grace of movement. Not his neighbors only, but the most zealous of the Federalists of the State, sent him to the convention. It was there that such eloquence as he possessed was peculiarly needed. The ground was to be fought over inch by inch, and with antagonists whom it would be difficult, if not impossible, to beat. There was to be contest over every word of the Constitution from its first to its last. "Give me leave," cried Patrick Henry in his opening speech, "to demand what right had they to say 'We the people' instead of 'We the States'?" He began at the beginning. It was the gage of the coming battle; the defenders were challenged to show that any better union than that already in existence was needed, and that in this new Constitution a better union was furnished.

As month after month passed away while the Constitution was before the people for adoption, the anxiety of the Federalists grew, lest the requisite nine States should not give their assent. But when eight were secured there was room to hope even for unanimity, if Virginia should come in as the ninth. Should she say Yes, the Union might be perfect; for the remaining States would be almost sure to follow her lead. But should she say No, the final result would be doubtful, even if the requisite nine should be secured by the acquiescence of one of the smaller States. This answer could not, of course, depend altogether upon one man, but it did depend more upon Madison than upon anybody else.

The convention was in session nearly a month. At the end of a fortnight he was not hopeful. "The business," he wrote to Washington, "is in the most ticklish state that can be imagined. The majority will certainly be very small, on whatever side it may finally lie; and I dare not encourage much expectation that it will be on the favorable side." But his fears stimulated rather than discouraged him. He was always on his feet; always ready to meet argument with argument; always prompt to appeal from passion to reason; quick to brush aside mere declamation, and to bring the minds of his hearers back to a calm consideration of how much was at stake, and of the weight of the responsibility resting on that convention. Others were no less earnest and diligent than he; but he was easily chief, and the burden and heat of the day fell mainly upon him. Probably when the convention assembled the majority were opposed to the Constitution; but its adoption was carried at last by a vote of eighty-nine to seventy-nine. Thenceforth opposition in the remaining States was hopeless.

New Hampshire—though the fact was not known in Virginia—preceded that State by a few days in accepting the Constitution, so that the requisite nine were secured before the convention at Richmond came to a decision. But it was her decision, nevertheless, that really settled, so far as can be seen now, the question of a permanent Union. Had the vote of Virginia been the other way it is not likely that Hamilton would have carried New York, or that North Carolina and Rhode Island would have finally decided not to be left in solitude outside. What the history of the nine united States only, with four disunited States among them, might have been, it is impossible to know, and quite useless to conjecture. The conditions which some of the States attached to the act of adoption, the addition of a Bill of Rights, proposed amendments to the Constitution, and the suggestion of submitting it to a second convention, were matters of comparatively little moment, when the majority of ten delegates was secured at Richmond. These were questions that could be postponed. "The delay of a few years," Madison wrote to Jefferson, "will assuage the jealousies which have been artificially created by designing men, and will at the same time point out the faults which call for amendment."

Immediately after the adjournment of the Richmond Convention he returned to New York, where the confederate Congress was still in session. That body had little to do now but decide upon the time and place of the inauguration of the new government. Madison had entered upon his thirty-eighth year, and we get an interesting glimpse of him as he appeared at this time of his life to an intelligent foreigner. "Mr. Warville Brissot has just arrived here," he wrote to Jefferson in August, 1788. This was Brissot de Warville, a Frenchman of the new philosophy,—whose head, nevertheless, his compatriots cut off a few years later,—then traveling in America to observe the condition and progress of the new republic. His tour extended to nearly all the States; he met with most of the distinguished men of the country; and he made a careful and intelligent use of his many opportunities for observation. On his return to France he wrote an entertaining volume,—"New Travels in the United States of America,"—still to be found in some old libraries. What he says of Madison is worth repeating, not only for the impression he made upon an observant stranger, but as the evidence of the contemporary estimate of his character and reputation, which De Warville must have gathered from others.

"The name of Madison," he writes, "celebrated in America, is well known in Europe by the merited eulogium made of him by his countryman and friend, Mr. Jefferson.

"Though still young, he has rendered the greatest services to Virginia, to the American Confederation, and to liberty and humanity in general. He contributed much, with Mr. White, in reforming the civil and criminal codes of his country. He distinguished himself particularly in the convention for the acceptation of the new federal system. Virginia balanced a long time in adhering to it. Mr. Madison determined to it the members of the convention by his eloquence and logic. This republican appears to be about thirty-eight years of age. He had, when I saw him, an air of fatigue; perhaps it was the effect of the immense labors to which he has devoted himself for some time past. His look announces a censor, his conversation discovers the man of learning, and his reserve was that of a man conscious of his talents and of his duties.

"During the dinner, to which he invited me, they spoke of the refusal of North Carolina to accede to the new Constitution. The majority against it was one hundred. Mr. Madison believed that this refusal would have no weight on the minds of the Americans, and that it would not impede the operations of Congress. I told him that though this refusal might be regarded as a trifle in America, it would have great weight in Europe; that they would never inquire there into the motives which dictated it, nor consider the small consequence of this State in the confederation; that it would be regarded as a germ of division, calculated to retard the operations of Congress; and that certainly this idea would prevent the resurrection of American credit.

"Mr. Madison attributed this refusal to the attachment of a great part of the inhabitants of that State to their paper money and their tender act. He was much inclined to believe that this disposition would not remain a long time."

In October the Virginia Assembly met. Two thirds of its members were opposed to the new Constitution, and at their head was Patrick Henry, his zeal against it not in the least abated because he had been defeated in the late convention. The acceptance of the Constitution by that representative body could not be recalled. But the Assembly could, at least, protest against it, and was led by Henry to call upon Congress to convene a second national convention to do over again the work of the first. The legislature was to elect senators for the first Senate under the new government; and it was also to divide the State into districts for its representation in the lower house of Congress. In ordinary fairness, as the State had, in a popular convention, so recently accepted the Constitution, the party then in the majority was entitled to at least one of the representatives in the Senate. But Henry nominated both, and could command votes enough to elect them. In modern party usage this would seem quite unobjectionable; indeed, a modern politician who should not use such an advantage for his party would be considered as unfit for practical politics. But a hundred years ago it was thought sharp practice, and a fair proportion of Henry's partisans refused to be bound by it. One of Henry's nominees was elected by a majority of twenty over Madison; but in the case of the other that majority was reduced more than half, and a change of five more votes would have elected Madison.

He had, however, neither expected nor wished to be sent to the Senate, while he did hope to be elected to the House of Representatives. The Senate was intended to be the more dignified body, requiring in its members a certain style of living for which wealth was indispensable. Madison had not the means to give that kind of social support to official position; but he could afford to belong to that body where a member was not the less respectable because his whole domestic establishment might be a bachelor's room in a boarding-house.

Virginia was, as he wrote to Washington, "the only instance among the ratifying States in which the politics of the legislature are at variance with the sense of the people, expressed by their representatives in convention." This had enabled Henry and a majority of his friends to elect senators who, representing "the politics of the legislature," did not represent "the sense of the people" in regard to the national Constitution. But in the election of members of the House of Representatives, the sense of the people was to be again appealed to, and a new way must be devised for asserting the supremacy of legislative power. The cleverness of Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, many years later, under similar circumstances, introduced a new word into the language of the country, and, it was supposed at the time, a new device in American politics. But what has since been known as "Gerrymandering" was really the invention of Patrick Henry. This method of arranging counties into congressional districts in accordance with their political affinities, without regard to their geographical lines, Henry attempted to do with Mr. Madison's own county. By joining it to distant counties it was expected that an anti-Federal majority would be secured large enough to insure his defeat. The attempt to elect him to the Senate was, Madison wrote to Jefferson, "defeated by Mr. Henry, who is omnipotent in the present legislature." He adds that Henry "has taken equal pains, in forming the counties into districts for the election of representatives, to associate with Orange such as are most devoted to his politics, and most likely to be swayed by the prejudices excited against me." The scheme, however, was unsuccessful, perhaps partly because of the indignation which so dishonorable a measure to defeat a political opponent excited throughout the State. Madison entered upon an active canvass of his district against James Monroe, who had been nominated as a moderate anti-Federalist, and defeated him. It was winter time, and in the exposure of some of his long rides his ears were frozen. In later life he sometimes laughingly pointed to the scars of these wounds received, he said, in the service of his country.

Thus Henry's "Gerrymander," like many another useful and curious device, brought neither profit nor credit to the original inventor. Had Henry acted in the broader spirit of the modern politician, who sees that he serves himself best who serves his party best, he would have disposed of every Federal county in the State as he disposed of Orange. As it was, he only aroused a good deal of indignation and defeated himself by openly aiming to gratify his personal resentments. Had he scattered his shot for the general good of the party, he would, perhaps, have brought down his particular bird.

CHAPTER X

THE FIRST CONGRESS

The confederate Congress, at its final session in 1788, had fixed the time for the election of President and Vice-President under the Constitution, and the time and place for the meeting of the first Congress of the new government. The day appointed was the first Wednesday of the following March, and, as that date fell on the fourth of the month, a precedent was established which has ever since been observed in the installation of a new President. The place was not so easily determined. The choice lay between New York and Philadelphia, and the struggle was prolonged, not because the question of the temporary seat of government was of much moment, but because of the influence the decision might have upon the future settlement of the permanent place for the capital.

No quorum of the new Congress was present at New York on March 4, 1789, and neither house was organized until early in April. On the 23rd Washington arrived; and on the 30th he took the oath of office as first President of the United States, standing on the balcony of Federal Hall, at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, a site now occupied by another building used as the subtreasury. A week before, when the ceremonies proper for such an occasion were a subject of discussion in Congress, the question of fitting titles for the President and Vice-President came up for consideration. It was decided that when the President arrived the Vice-President should meet him at the door of the senate chamber, lead him to the chair, and then, in a formal address, inform him that the two houses were ready to witness the administration of the oath of office. "Upon this," says John Adams in a letter written three years afterward, "I arose in my place and asked the advice of the Senate, in what form I should address him, whether I should say 'Mr. Washington,' 'Mr. President,' 'Sir,' 'May it please your Excellency,' or what else? I observed that it had been common while he commanded the army to call him 'His Excellency,' but I was free to own it would appear to me better to give him no title but 'Sir,' or 'Mr. President,' than to put him on a level with a governor of Bermuda, or one of his own ambassadors, or a governor of any one of our States."

Thereupon the question went to a conference committee of both houses, who reported that no other title would be proper for either President or Vice-President, at any time, than those which were given by the Constitution. To this report the Senate disagreed and appointed a new committee. This proposed that the President should be called "His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties." When wise men are absurd they presume on their prerogative. The Senate accepted the report, but the House had the good sense to reject it, consenting, however, to leave the question in abeyance. On these proceedings Mr. Madison thus commented in a letter to Jefferson:—

"My last inclosed copies of the President's inaugural speech, and the answer of the House of Representatives. I now add the answer of the Senate. It will not have escaped you that the former was addressed with a truly republican simplicity to George Washington, President of the United States. The latter follows the example, with the omission of the personal name, but without any other than the constitutional title. The proceeding on this point was, in the House of Representatives, spontaneous. The imitation by the Senate was extorted. The question became a serious one between the two houses. J. Adams espoused the cause of titles with great earnestness. His friend, R. H. Lee, although elected as a republican enemy to an aristocratic Constitution, was a most zealous second. The projected title was, His Highness the President of the United States and the Protector of their Liberties. Had the project succeeded, it would have subjected the President to a severe dilemma, and given a deep wound to our infant government."

Washington has sometimes been accused of wishing for the title of "His Highness," and of having suggested it. Had this been true, Madison would have been certain to know it, and he was quite incapable of asserting in that case that such a title would have been to the President "a severe dilemma." About Mr. Adams he was perhaps mistaken, as he might easily have been, since he was not a member of the Senate, and probably heard only a confused report of how the question was brought before that body. As Mr. Adams's letter, quoted just now, shows, he regarded the charge as a calumny and resented it. He gave them, according to his own statement, no other opinion than that he preferred "Sir," or "Mr. President," as a more proper address than "Excellency," a title then, as now, pertaining to governors of States. He probably took no further part in the debate, but it is not impossible that he may in private have avowed a preference for some other and higher title than either "Mr. President" or "Your Excellency." "For," he said in the explanatory letter to his friend, "I freely own that I think decent and moderate titles, as distinctions of offices, are not only harmless, but useful in society; and that in this country, where I know them to be prized by the people as well as their magistrates as highly as by any people or any magistrates in the world, I should think some distinction between the magistrates of the national government and those of the state governments proper." A distinction might be proper enough if there were to be any titles whatever; but certainly they were the wiser who preferred good homespun to threadbare old clothes. Had rags of that sort been made a legal uniform, it is almost appalling to reflect upon the absurdities to which the national fondness for titles would have carried us.

From March 4 to April 1, though the House of Representatives met daily, there were not members enough present to make a quorum. The first real business brought before the House, except that relating to its organization, was introduced by Madison, two days after the inauguration. It was a proposition to raise a revenue by duties on imports, and by a tonnage duty on all vessels, American and foreign, bringing goods, wares, or merchandise into the United States. The essential weakness of the late Confederacy was, first of all, to be remedied by uniform rules for the regulation of trade. Revenue must be provided for the support of government, and that in a way which should not be oppressive to the people. Commerce, Mr. Madison said, "ought to be as free as the policy of nations will admit," but government must be supported, and taxes the least burdensome and most easily collected are those derived from duties on imports. He agreed, however, as he said on the second day of the debate, with those who would so adjust the duties on foreign goods as to protect the "infant manufactories" of the country. With little interruption this subject was debated for the first six weeks of the opening session of the First Congress. No other could have been hit upon to test so thoroughly the strength of the new bond of union. It was to brush aside all those trade regulations in the several States which each had hitherto thought essential to its prosperity. Every interest in the country was to be considered, and their different, sometimes opposing, claims to be reconciled.

New England was sure that, should the tax on molasses be too high, the distilleries would be shut up, and a great New England industry destroyed. Nor would the injury stop there. The fisheries, as well as the distilleries, would be ruined. For three fifths of the fish put up for the West Indies could find no market anywhere else; and a market existed there only because molasses was taken in exchange. A prohibitory duty on that article, or a duty that should seriously interfere with its importation, would wellnigh destroy the fisheries. What then would become of the nursery of American seamen? With no seamen there would be no shipbuilding. What sadder picture than this of a New England without rum, without codfish, without seamen, and without ships! One can easily conceive that even in that restrained and dignified First Congress there was no want of serious and alarmed expostulation, and even some threatening talk from such men as the tranquil Goodhue, the thoughtful and scholarly Ames, and the impulsive Gerry.

Then the South, for her part, was alarmed lest, among other things, too high a tonnage duty should leave her tobacco, her rice and indigo, rotting in the fields and warehouses for want of ships to take them to market. She had no ships of her own and could have none, and she invited the ships of the rest of the world to come for her products and bring in return all she needed for her own consumption. The picture of the possible ruin of New England was as nothing to that of the Southern planter scanning the horizon with weary eyes in vain for the sight of a sail, while behind him was a dangerous crowd of hungry blacks with nothing to do. That desolation seemed complete to the southernmost States when it was also proposed to levy a tax of ten dollars upon every slave imported. In short, the whole subject bristled with difficulties. The problem was nothing more nor less than how to tax everything, and at the same time convince everybody that the scheme was for the general good, while nobody's special interests were sacrificed. The "infant industries," to which Mr. Madison alluded, really received no special consideration in the final adjustment, and they were too feeble then even to cry for nursing. They have grown stronger since, though they are "infants" still; and they should never cease to be grateful to him who, however unwittingly, gave them a name to live by for a hundred years.

But the most remarkable part of the debate was that upon the proposition of Mr. Parker of Virginia to impose a duty upon the importation of slaves. Could the progress of events have been foreseen, that proposal might have been regarded as meant to protect an "infant industry" of the northernmost slave States. But the wildest imagination then could not conceive of the domestic slave trade of a few years later, when a chief source of the prosperity of Virginia would be her perennial crop of young men and women to be shipped for New Orleans and a market. But Mr. Parker had no ulterior motive when he avowed his regret that the Constitution had failed to prohibit the importation of slaves from Africa, and hoped that the duty he proposed would prevent, in some degree, a traffic which he pronounced "irrational and inhuman." It would have been difficult to have found a Virginian of that day who would not have taken down his shotgun on hearing that there were miscreants prowling about his kitchen doors in the hope of buying up the strongest young people of his household for export to the Southwest.

Judging from the imperfect report of the debate upon the subject, it would seem that the bargain relative to the slave trade, made in the Constitutional Convention of two years before between New England and the two southernmost States, might still hold good. Or there may have been a new bargain; or, perhaps, both sides trusted to a tacit recognition of the eternal fitness of things, and made common cause where legislation threatened at the same time the distillery and the slave-ship.[11] At any rate, the extreme Southerners expressed surprise at the audacity which would disturb a compromise of the Constitution; the extreme Northerners deprecated it as quite uncalled for in any consideration of the subject of revenue. The principle of Mr. Parker's motion, Mr. Sherman of Connecticut thought, was to correct a moral evil; the principle of the bill before the House was to raise a revenue. At some other time he would be willing to consider the question of taxing the importation of negroes on the ground of humanity and policy; but it was a sufficient reason with him for not admitting it as an object of revenue that the burden would fall upon two States only. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts could only take counsel of his conscience. From his soul, he said, he detested slavery; and—forgetting, apparently, that this tax was provided for by the Constitution—he doubted whether imposing it "would not have the appearance of authorizing the practice" of trading in slaves. This was his reason for wishing to postpone the subject. But Mr. Livermore of New Hampshire was more ingenious still. If the imported negroes were goods, wares, or merchandise, they would come within the title of the bill, and be taxed under the general rule of five per centum, which would be about the same rate as ten dollars a head; but if they were not goods, wares, or merchandise, then such importation could not properly be included in the consideration of the question of a revenue from duties on such articles of trade.

Mr. Madison came to the help of his colleague, and brushed aside the sophistries of the New England allies of the slave traders. If there were anything wanting in the title of the bill to cover this particular duty, it was easy to add it. If the question was not one of taxation because it was one of humanity, it would be quite as difficult to deal with it under any other bill for levying a duty as under this. If the tax seemed unjust because it bore heavily upon a single class, that would be a good reason for remitting many taxes which there was no hesitation in imposing. If ten dollars seemed a heavy duty, a little calculation would show that it was only about the proposed ad valorem duty of five per centum on most other importations. "It is to be hoped," he added, "that by expressing a national disapprobation of this trade we may destroy it, and save ourselves from reproaches, and our posterity the imbecility ever attendant on a country filled with slaves." "If there is any one point," he continued, "in which it is clearly the policy of this nation, so far as we constitutionally can, to vary the practice obtaining under some of the state governments, it is this.... It is as much the interest of Georgia and South Carolina as of any in the Union. Every addition they receive to their number of slaves tends to weaken and render them less capable of self-defense.... It is a necessary duty of the general government to protect every part of the empire against danger, as well internal as external. Everything, therefore, which tends to increase this danger, though it may be a local affair, yet, if it involves national expense or safety, becomes of concern to every part of the Union, and is a proper subject for the consideration of those charged with the general administration of the government." No Northern man, except Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, supported this measure; and none from the Southern States, except three of the Virginia members, with Madison leading. As the foreign slave trade was protected in the Constitution for twenty years by a bargain between the two southernmost States and New England, so now the same influence staved off the imposition of the tax which was a part of the consideration to be given for that constitutional protection of the trade. It is not a creditable fact; but it is, nevertheless, a fact and a representative one in the history of the United States. And it is to Madison's great honor that he had neither part nor lot in it.

After six weeks of earnest debate, an amicable and satisfactory agreement was made to impose a moderate duty upon pretty much everything imported, except slaves from Africa. It was literally a tariff for revenue; but it was a settlement that settled nothing definitely, except that the provision of the Constitution for a tax of ten dollars on imported slaves should be a dead letter. Thenceforth the policy of free trade was established, so far as African slaves were concerned, till the traffic was supposed to cease by constitutional limitation and Act of Congress in 1808.[12]

The determination to protect the commercial interests of the country, beyond the point of mere revenue, was more manifest in fixing the rate of duty upon tonnage than in duties upon importations. It was generally agreed, after much debate, that American commerce had better be in American hands, and a difference of twenty cents a ton was made between the tax upon domestic and that upon foreign ships, as a measure of protection to American shipping. Mr. Madison proposed to make it still larger, but the House would only agree to increase it to forty cents on ships belonging to powers with which the United States had no treaties. The Senate, however, refused to admit this distinction, and insisted that all foreign ships should be subject to the same tonnage duty without regard to existing treaties. The House assented, lest the bill should be lost altogether. This proposed differential duty on foreign vessels was as clearly aimed at Great Britain as if that power had been named in the bill. Nor, indeed, was there any attempt at concealment; for it was openly avowed that America had no formidable rival except the English, who already largely controlled the commerce of the United States. In the debates and in the final decision of the question is shown clearly enough the difference of opinion and of feeling, which soon made the dividing line between the two great parties of the first quarter of a century under the Constitution. Nobody then foresaw how bitter that difference of party was to be, nor what disastrous consequences would follow it.

Mr. Madison was among the most zealous of those who insisted upon a discrimination against Great Britain. He thought it should be made for the dignity no less than for the interest of the United States. He had no fear, he said, "of entering into a commercial warfare with that nation." England, he believed, could do this country no harm by any peaceful reprisals she could devise. She supplied the United States with no article either of necessity or of luxury that the people of the United States could not manufacture for themselves. He called those "Anglicists" who did not agree with him, and who believed that it was in the power of Great Britain to hinder or to help immensely the prosperity of the United States. It was not of so much moment what America bought of England as it was that England should consent to free trade with her colonies; and on every account it was wiser to conciliate than to defy Great Britain; wiser to induce her to enter into a friendly commercial alliance than to provoke her to retaliate upon the feeble commerce of this country, upon which she had so strong a grip. Madison had shown himself, before this time, half credulous of the charges of a leaning toward England, and toward monarchy, made by those who wanted a congress of petty states against those who wanted a strong national government. If, however, there were Anglicism on one side, so there was quite as much Gallicism, if not a good deal more, on the other. In writing to Jefferson of the probability that the Senate would make no discrimination in the tonnage duties, he said that in that case "Great Britain will be quieted in the enjoyment of our trade as she may please to regulate it, and France discouraged from her efforts at a competition which it is not less our interest than hers to promote." Whatever may be thought of this first concession of the new government to England, it is quite as much the coming party leader as the statesman who speaks here. It may not be doubted that he sincerely thought it to be, as he said, "impolitic, in every view that can be taken of the subject, to put Great Britain at once on the footing of the most favored nation." But the relation of American interests to English interests was evidently already associated in his mind with the relations of France and England, so soon to be the absorbing question in American politics.

The impost act was followed by others hardly less important in putting the new Constitution into operation under its first Congress. The direction of business seems, by common consent, to have been intrusted to Mr. Madison among the many able men of that body; doubtless because of his thorough familiarity with the Constitution, and of his methodical ways. He was sure to bring things forward in their due order, to provide judiciously for the more immediate needs. The impost bill secured the means to work with; the next necessity was to organize the machinery to do the work. Resolutions to create the executive departments of Foreign Affairs, of the Treasury, and of War were offered by Mr. Madison. These were required in general terms by the Constitution, with a single officer at the head of each, to be appointed by the President "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate." The manner of the appointment of subordinate officers was provided for by the Constitution, but the manner of their removal from office was not. Was the tenure of office to be good behavior? Were the incumbents removable, with or without cause? If the power of removal existed, did it vest in the power that appointed, that is, in the President and Senate conjointly, or in the President alone?

As the Constitution was silent, the question had to be settled on its own merits. With all the arguments that could be urged, either on one side or the other, we are familiar enough in our time, coming up as the question so often does in changes in state constitutions and municipal charters, and in the discussion of the necessity for civil service reform. There is this essential difference, however, between now and then: we know the mischiefs that come from the power of official removal, which were then only dimly apprehended. The power of removal from office belonged, Mr. Madison believed, rightfully to the chief magistrate, and, if by some unhappy chance the wrong man should find his way to that position and abuse the power intrusted to him, "the wanton removal of meritorious officers would," he said, "subject the President to impeachment and removal from his own high trust."

Lofty political principles like these may still be found in the platforms of modern political parties,—

"The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out."

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

NATIONAL FINANCES—SLAVERY

Hamilton's famous report to the First Congress, as secretary of the treasury, was made at the second session in January, 1790. Near the close of the previous session a petition asking for some settlement of the public debt was received and referred to a committee of which Madison was chairman. The committee reported in favor of the petition, and the House accordingly called upon the secretary to prepare a plan "for the support of the public credit."

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.

"They earnestly entreat," they said, "your serious attention to the subject of slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to these unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will promote mercy and justice towards this distressed race; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men."

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.

Fisher Ames

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

FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS

Madison was a Federalist until, unfortunately, he drifted into the opposition. He was swept away partly, perhaps, by the influence of personal friends, particularly of Jefferson, and partly by the influence of locality,—that "go-with-the-State" doctrine, which is a harmless kind of patriotism when kept within proper limits, but dangerous in a mixed government like ours when unrestrained. Had he been born in a free State it seems more than probable that he would never have been President; but it is quite possible that his place in the history of his country would have been higher. The better part of his life was before he became a party leader. As his career is followed the presence of the statesman grows gradually dimmer in the shadow of the successful politician.

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.