Napoleon saw his chance to make sport of the United States. Through his foreign minister, the duc de Cadore, he seemed to make a great concession to the United States with what came to be known as the Cadore Letter. Just as Erskine had, so now Napoleon seemed to fulfill all of the Republicans’ foreign policy hopes. He announced the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, which had excluded American shipping from the greater French Empire’s ports, and said that he understood this would lead the British to renounce their Orders-in-Council restricting neutral—that is, chiefly American—shipping and negate their own blockade policy, or that the Americans would, as the American minister reported, “Cause their rights to be respected by the English.”21

  Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton sent Madison a New York newspaper including word of the Cadore Letter and the news that the British Cabinet would soon repeal its Orders-in-Council and send a new minister to Washington in late September.22 Madison therefore rashly issued a proclamation on November 2nd, also signed by Smith, announcing that American trade with France would resume.23 It seems that he felt sanguine in issuing this proclamation insofar as relations with Britain were concerned because of his ongoing annoyance with Jackson, who had dawdled for several weeks prior to departing, and with various British ministers’ behavior toward Minister William Pinkney. “[E]verything,” he told Pinkney, “was rendered as offensive as possible by evasions and delays.…”24

  Madison also seems to have decided that in case war proved unavoidable, he preferred a British one to a French one.25 Perhaps he thought self-respect required that His Majesty’s Government’s Rule of 1756 and the Chesapeake-Leopard Incident be avenged, maybe he had already decided on a military strategy for a British war, perhaps he still held out hope that the French would aid the United States in acquiring former Spanish territory in North America, or maybe, just maybe, the British were right that the president remained a Francophile at heart.26

  Meanwhile, on October 10, 1810, Americans in Spanish West Florida seized Baton Rouge.27 Napoleon’s displacement of the Bourbon king of Spain, Fernando VII, and installation of his own older brother Joseph Bonaparte in his place touched off a wave of rebellions in Spain’s enormous New World empire, where no one recognized Joseph as legitimate successor to the Spanish throne. In the coastal colony between the Mississippi and the Perdido, where Americans outnumbered Spaniards by four to one, Jefferson and Madison’s long-standing expectation that the Gulf Coast region eventually would be America’s seemed on the verge of fulfillment.

  The Americans asked for West Florida to become “an integral and inalienable portion of the United States.” When he got the news, Madison issued a proclamation.28 In it he pointed to the American claim that West Florida was included in the territory obtained by the United States via the Louisiana Purchase. The government had been kept from acting on that claim by “conciliatory views, and by a confidence in the justice of their cause; and in the Success of candid discussion and amicable negotiation with a just and friendly power.” Now, however, “a crisis ha[d] at length arrived subversive of the order of things under the Spanish Authorities whereby a failure of the United States to take the said Territory into its possession m[ight] lead to events ultimately contravening the views of both parties”—that is, British intervention.

  Besides that worry Madison pointed to constitutional justification for what he was going to do: that “the tranquility and security” of America’s adjacent lands were “endangered, and new facilities given to violations of our Revenue and Commercial laws, and of those prohibiting the introduction of Slaves” into the United States; and that in case America took possession of this territory, of which various acts of Congress had been written with possession in mind, America could still participate in “fair and friendly negotiation and adjustment” with Spain. Therefore he had directed Governor C. C. Claiborne of Orleans Territory to take possession of West Florida as part of his territory. The president privately instructed Claiborne not to use force against any Spanish force he might find still in possession of part of the colony, but instead to report the facts to Washington posthaste.29 Meanwhile Secretary Smith made clear to the French minister in Washington that the U.S.A. would take whatever action was necessary to vindicate its purported right to West Florida.30 Jefferson urged Representative Eppes that Congress grant Madison authority to seize East Florida as well, so that the British would not grab Pensacola and St. Augustine. Although Congress did indeed give him the authority in case of either a request from East Florida’s inhabitants or intervention by a third power, Madison did not get to follow up on it. Americans hoping for Florida annexation would have to await unanticipated events in the Monroe administration.31

  31

  Even as this crisis was resolved to America’s benefit, the administration suffered serious setbacks in Congress. Both centered on initiatives advocated by Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. First, although Gallatin had urged him to do so, President Madison did not publicly call upon Congress to recharter the Bank of the United States. Perhaps feeling himself to be in a sticky situation due to his having led the charge against the constitutionality of the bill chartering the bank both in the House and in private advice to President George Washington twenty years before, he instead let Gallatin advocate the new bill on Capitol Hill.1 As historian Robert Rutland explains, Gallatin “… looked at the bank as a safe place to deposit government funds, an efficient clearinghouse for tax revenues from the several port collectors’ receipts, and a ready source of capital when the government issued bonds to fill gaps between income and payments.… As usual, Gallatin was right on every count except the one that mattered most: the need for Republican support. Hard-core Republicans like Senator Smith of Maryland winced every time the Bank was mentioned.…”2

  In the House, Speaker Macon held rumors of Madison’s opposition to the bill responsible for the 65–64 vote to postpone a decision on the bank bill. In the Senate, Smith was not alone. Rather the other Invisibles, Leib and Giles, joined fourteen other Republican opponents in thwarting the ten Republicans and seven Federalists voting “aye.” Vice President George Clinton explained his tie-breaking “nay” vote in February 20, 1811, remarks laying out the classic Jeffersonian position developed by Secretary of State Jefferson (in the mode of Representative Madison) in 1791: that power to charter a corporation “is a high attribute of sovereignty … not … derivative by implication, but primary and independent”—which is to say, it could not be teased out of the Necessary and Proper Clause or the General Welfare Clause, but would have been among the enumerated powers if it had been granted to Congress in the Constitution at all.3 Congress also at about this time rejected Gallatin’s request that import duties be raised to offset revenues lost due to the policy of nonintercourse with the British.

  By this point the Smiths, senator and secretary of state, had rendered Madison’s efforts to maintain an able, effective Cabinet impossible. The secretary’s ineptitude posed the chief problem, but Senator Smith’s intermittent efforts to thwart the administration’s legislative initiatives, when considered in combination with Secretary Smith’s sabotage of Madison’s diplomatic efforts, had become insupportable. Top members of Congress, recognizing the problem, told Madison he had to be rid of Robert Smith. They included Speaker Macon and William Crawford, among others. To underscore the need for prompt action, Gallatin tendered his resignation.4

  Essential to the Cabinet reorganization these men and Gallatin had in mind was that Madison’s friendship with James Monroe had been reestablished.

  Superior diplomat to his secretary of state, Madison thought to ease Smith out with an offer of the post of minister to Russia.5 We have a detailed account from the president’s perspective because upon seeing Smith’s angry account in the press, the chief executive decided to write out a careful, detailed account of what had led them to that point. As Madison told it, he began by assuring Smith that he had let the intention simmer to ensure that his “communication might have the character of being not the result of any sudden impulse, but of a deliberate regard to public considerations, and official duty.…” He next told Smith, if his account is to be believed, that although Cabinet deliberations had been congenial, accounts of them heard out-of-doors often struck a different chord, and “this practice, as brought to my view, was exclusively chargeable on him.” To Smith’s denial Madison responded with reference to “facts and circumstances, brought to my knowledge, from so many sources and with so many corroborations, that it was impossible to shut my mind against them.”

  Madison went on to tell Smith that though the secretary had accepted Macon’s Bill and the nonintercourse law in Cabinet discussion as the best likely to be obtained from Congress at a time when something must be done, “his conversations & conduct out of doors, had been entirely of a counteracting nature; that it was generally believed that he was in an unfriendly disposition personally and officially.…” To top it all off, “with those of a certain temper,… [he] had gone so far as to avow a disapprobation of the whole policy of commercial restrictions, from the Embargo throughout.”

  We ought not from the humiliating exchange to take the impression that the abashed secretary of state had been always in the wrong, as a policy matter, when he let people outside Madison’s official circle know that he disapproved of administration policy. Thus, for example, one prominent newspaper editor had in January 1811 counseled Madison to await news that Napoleon actually had revoked his commercial decrees before the United States revoked its.6 As we have seen, Madison’s precipitation cost America many merchant ships, which were seized by France in Europe.

  Along the way Madison also mentioned that he, the president, had given Smith aid in performing the duties of the secretarial office. In fact he told him that “it was an imperious consideration for a change in the Departmt. of State, that whatever talents he might possess, he did not as he must have found by experience, possess those adapted to his station; that this had thrown the business more into my hands than was proper,” and that this added burden had become too much for the president to bear. To Smith’s denial Madison responded with a harsher evaluation of his performance.

  After a bit more of such back-and-forth, Madison at last told Smith that he wanted to make him minister to the Russian court. Smith answered that he would prefer the Court of St. James’s, and when Madison swatted down that idea, he alluded to a likely pending opening on the Supreme Court. This hint too Madison rejected. The talk turned once again to Russia. In Madison’s account his explanation to Smith of the grounds on which he favored this idea cannot have seemed to the secretary anything other than lukewarm. Now, however, Smith accepted. The two of them agreed on a date when the nomination was to be made public—before which Smith returned to Madison, accused him of leaking to the public the idea that this appointment was a palliative for being sacked as secretary of state, and said he no longer wanted the Russian post. Madison told Smith that one last point had occurred to him: while Smith’s brother the senator had uniformly opposed the administration’s foreign policy, thus leading the public to infer that the secretary of state must too, Madison had never ascribed any motive other than patriotism to the senator. Former secretary Smith left Washington on April 6, 1811, and a couple of days later, he wrote a friend a letter referring to “the enfeeble[d] mind of our panic-struck President.” By the end of June, a pamphlet titled Robert Smith’s Address to the People of the United States laid out his critique of Madison. None of this augured well for Madison’s relations with Congress.

  At last Madison could substantially upgrade his Cabinet by replacing a low-grade secretary of state. To do so he turned to his once and future friend James Monroe. Since playing the key role in the younger man’s election by the General Assembly to the Virginia governorship and urging a reluctant Jefferson to forgo seeking a constitutional amendment legitimating (if it had been illegitimate) Monroe and Livingston’s Louisiana Purchase, Madison had, recall, played a part in President Jefferson’s determination not to submit the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty to the Senate for ratification. Urged to do so by friends such as John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Monroe took this as an affront—such an affront as to justify allowing the Old Republicans to put forward Monroe’s candidacy in opposition to Madison’s (spearheaded in Virginia by William Branch Giles, no less) for president in 1808.7 He thought the Embargo Act debacle proved the wisdom of the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty, which he lamented that Jefferson (no doubt, he felt certain, at Madison’s urging) had rejected.8

  Jefferson lamented this all the while.9 He wrote Monroe telling him to remember his old friends, as the disputants’ coadjutors were likely to cause friction between them; he also assured him that Madison had ever borne him friendship.10 Monroe, who had rejected the governorship of Louisiana Territory as beneath him, finally bowed to the will of the General Assembly, which made him governor again. It seems perhaps the president had intended this to happen, as he appointed Governor John Tyler to a federal judgeship, which cleared the way for Delegate Monroe.11

  As these events occurred, a prominent member of the Virginia Senate, Chapman Johnson, wrote Monroe seeking reassurance. Though they knew Monroe as a devout Republican, the senators also knew he had allowed his name to be put forth as an alternative to Madison’s in the 1808 presidential contest. Therefore, though he had no doubts, Johnson found that some friends of the Madison administration would like reassurances before they returned him to the chief executive’s post.12 A stickler for republican principle, Monroe replied that though happy with the “spirit of amity and conciliation” evident in his letter, and though he had no personal difficulties with the president, “a disposition” “to approve without examination and conviction every measure of any administration … cannot be indulged and acted on, without a surrender of the first principles of free government.…” “All that any administration can desire, of a free and rational people,” he insisted, was “a rational and manly support of its conduct, when it bears the test of impartial investigation, by the standard of the constitution, and by its tendency to promote the public welfare.” He would offer this to the United States Government, and he would expect no other type of support from Virginians.13 As Monroe explained to a friend, by writing this letter he had “conceded nothing, in any one respect.”14

  These quasi-assurances marked a substantial break with his close ally of recent years, John Randolph of Roanoke—the leader of the Tertium Quids and chief instigator of Monroe’s 1808 presidential candidacy. Not wanting to be seen in the company of the Madison administration’s most vociferous critic, Monroe replied to a message from Randolph with a message of his own, then sent Monroe’s son-in-law, John Hay, to speak to the congressman.15

  Randolph, evidently irked that Monroe had not taken time to meet with him, essentially accused the governor of betraying him and their friends. Referring to “The habits of intimacy which have existed between us,” the congressman mentioned rumors Monroe had sold out their principles in his quest to be elected governor of the Commonwealth. This had involved “unbecoming compliances with the Members of the Assembly, not excepting your bitterest personal enemies.” Among expedients to which Monroe was supposed to have sunk, Randolph continued, were “explanations … of the differences heretofore subsisting between yourself & Administration, which amount to a dereliction of the ground which you took after your return from England, & even of your warmest personal friends.” This, Randolph said, had made very bad impressions not only upon Randolph, but upon others Monroe had counted “among those most strongly attached to you.”

  Monroe’s chief political confidant, his son-in-law George Hay, arrived at Randolph’s lodgings just as Randolph finished reading two letters Monroe had sent to John Taylor of Caroline, another prominent 1808 backer of Monroe’s. The first of them, which was quite lengthy, had two sections: the first and longer one, which described Monroe’s reasons for being discontented with the Jefferson administration’s foreign policy from the time Pinkney was sent to join him in negotiating with the British; and a briefer section explaining that although a minority grouping might occasionally arise in a majority party, the people’s expectation that congressmen allied with the president would support him meant that in the end, they must return to routinely supporting the president. Those who had supported him in 1808 had the gratification of knowing that the embargo policy’s failure had vindicated the Monroe-Pinkney Treaty, he continued. “To us who have suffered by unmerited suspicion and abuse,” he concluded, “a fair opportunity is offer’d, to evince the purity and disinterestedness of our conduct.” They should not gloat over their vindication, as their country had been injured in the process.

  The second of the Monroe letters to Taylor that Randolph read dealt in part with a more historically significant matter. While the first of them showed that Monroe intended as a matter of principle—or so he cast it—to return to the Jeffersonian fold, this one found him considering the possibility of an America without political parties. He clearly thought this to be a worthy aim, though the ongoing existence of the Federalist Party, the continuing political activity of its leaders, meant that “keep[ing] the republican party in existence” remained necessary. With ongoing Federalist machinations, “there never was greater reason … for the preservation of the republican party, than at this time.” The period of the embargo found New England Federalists so desperate that “had the federal party gained the complete ascendancy there, and had the government perserverd in its policy,… its leaders would have pushed their fortune to its greatest extremity.” New Englanders thought economic coercion harmful to “their shipping, their fisheries, [and] their trade,” and they did not “believe that they [would] ever thrive by systems of privation.” Happily the perspective he had gained since had made clear to Monroe the necessity of relaxing the policy insofar as it affected New England.