The report of the Hartford Convention proposed seven constitutional amendments. Their stated purpose was “to strengthen, and if possible to perpetuate, the union of the states,” including by:

  requiring a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress to declare war, cut off trade with any foreign country, or admit new states to the union;

  limiting embargoes to sixty days;

  eliminating the Three-Fifths Clause’s application to apportionment of the House of Representatives, and thus the Electoral College;

  disqualifying naturalized citizens from holding federal office; [and]

  limiting presidents to one term and banning successive presidents from the same state.16

  Far from spurring the end of the Virginia Dynasty, what this set of proposals did was signal the end of the Federalist Party as a national party. At the time, however, people welcomed the report with relief; Madison is supposed to have laughed when he read it. What an anticlimax these moderate proposals had turned out to be.17 Though the Convention’s proceedings had been conducted behind closed doors, moderation had been the word of the day. As John Armstrong put it, the New England Federalists seemed to have been up to “a game of bragge.” Though Daniel Webster adjudged the proceedings “moderate, temperate & judicious,”18 they would stain his and other New England Federalists’ reputations for decades to come.

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  On February 4, 1815, Madison received the news from Ghent. The status quo antebellum—a return to the state of things as they had been before the war—was much better than had been feared just a few months earlier. All was jubilation. The president’s special message to Congress of February 18, 1815,1 summarized the stunning climax of fifteen years of foreign policy: Republicans had succeeded in spite of themselves. This outcome, Madison said, “terminates, with peculiar felicity, a campaign signalized by the most brilliant successes.” Americans had not wanted the war, but it had become a necessary endeavor “to assert the rights and independence of the nation.” Now “the causes of the war have ceased to operate,” he noted, “the Government has demonstrated the efficiency of its powers of defence,” and “the nation can review its conduct, without regret, and without reproach.”

  Historians traditionally have taken this statement as marking the end of the first phase of American history. Independence had at this point been secured in full and beyond doubt, and now there would come a turning. President Madison, however, did not understand the situation that way as he lived in it. He next noted that there would of course be an impulse in Congress and the country to pare back wartime military spending to traditional peacetime levels. He might have added, “as Republicans insisted should be done during the election campaign of 1800, and as President Jefferson said in his First Inaugural Address would be America’s custom from that moment on.” Although he traced American success in the war, such as it was, to “the public spirit of the militia, and … the valor of the military and Naval forces of the country,” his experience at Bladensburg and in the Octagon House—his refuge from the charred remains of the Executive Mansion—made clear to the Father of the Republican Party that he and his friend from Monticello had been mistaken.

  “Experience has taught us,” he went on, “that neither the pacific dispositions of the American people, nor the pacific character of their political Institutions can altogether exempt them from that strife which appears, beyond the ordinary lot of nations, to be incident to the actual period of the world,” so “a certain degree of preparation for war, is not only indispensable to avert disaster in the onset, but affords also the best security for the continuan[ce] of peace.” Therefore Congress, he was sure, would “provide for the maintenance of an adequate regular force.…” He specified that the naval forces, the harbor defenses, militia training, and “cultivat[ion of] the military art” should receive Congress’s attention on an ongoing basis.

  Peace would bring an economic bonanza. The president forecast that America would enter into mutually beneficial trade relations with countries similarly disposed. He added the caveat, however, that “the constant guardianship of Congress” should be extended to “the manufactures which have sprung into existence … during the period of the European wars. This source of national independence & wealth,” he concluded, “I anxiously recommend, to the prompt & constant guardianship of Congress.” He closed his message with a wish that America and Great Britain might come to have ongoing friendly relations—a wish no one at the time could have imagined being so thoroughly and enduringly granted—and with an asseveration that the nation’s highest officials should “never cease to inculcate obedience to the laws, and fidelity to the Union, as constituting the Palladium of the national independence and prosperity”—a statement that might as easily have been made by the Father of Our Country at the high tide of his alliance with Madison a quarter century earlier. Added to the complete success of American arms against the enemy’s Creek allies in the South, the message marked the entire success of Republican policy.2

  As soon as Congress ratified the Treaty of Ghent, President Madison asked for a declaration of war against the Barbary state of Algiers. That predatory power had resumed its old practice of preying on American Mediterranean shipping during the War of 1812, and now it would be taught the error of its ways. On May 20, 1815, a nine-ship U.S. Navy squadron under the command of Stephen Decatur set sail from New York. Decatur made quick work of that enemy, extracting a treaty from its dey by warning him that the American ships’ guns would all fire on his city unless he conceded the error of his ways, released all Americans he was holding for ransom, and agreed never again to demand American tribute—an agreement more favorable, says Henry Adams, than he had ever signed with any other nation. This success achieved, Decatur imposed similar terms on Tunis and Tripoli, which had even to pay American shipowners for their losses due to those states’ piratical practices.3

  If Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans made him the hero of a generation of Americans, the nineteenth-century American political figure most analogous to George Washington, Decatur, remains the country’s preeminent naval hero. Not only his smashing successes at sea, but his toast at a banquet in his honor famously took patriotism about as far as it could be taken with its perhaps lamentable conclusion of “my country right or wrong.”4

  The president’s annual message for 1815 capped off a year of spectacular achievement.5 Madison began by describing Decatur’s cruise, including his having captured the Algerine ruler’s principal ship with his admiral aboard. Turning to the happy conclusion of the War of 1812, Madison said he hoped Congress would consider confining American navigation to American sailors—a measure which, he thought, would combine a “conciliatory tendency” with “increasing the independence of our navigation, and the sources for our maritime defence.” The tribes that had taken Britain’s side in the war, he advised, had with the exception of the more distant ones already been pacified, and he hoped those last would soon follow. There might still be further problems with the Creeks, he feared.

  Unlike in times past Madison intended to act further on the path he and Congress had set off down when it came to the peacetime military establishment: a general staff was being organized. A thorough reform would come during the Monroe administration, as we shall see. The federal debt of various kinds he said had grown at least to $120 million. Assumption of the states’ war-related debt (another jarring idea coming from James Madison and more vindication of Alexander Hamilton) would lead to a bit more. Fortunately various military expenditures (ships, harbor fortifications, etc.) would provide ongoing benefits. They likely should be maintained and manned evermore. He hoped the U.S. Military Academy could be enlarged and recommended “the establishment of others in other sections of the union,” and he recommended that the state militias be reorganized uniformly via federal legislation. Too, the naval support facilities and the navy’s ships would need to be maintained. Congress by the end of 1816 earmarked $8 million over eight years to build nine seventy-four-gun ships and twelve forty-four-gun ships, among other things, for the navy.6

  If that were not enough, Madison now made public what in 1811 had been his private position: that Congress should charter a new bank to manage the public debt and provide a uniform national currency if the state banks could not. He next said that “[u]nder Circumstances giving a powerful impulse to manufacturing industry, it has made among us a progress, and exhibited an efficiency, which justify the beleif, that with a protection not more than is due to the enterprizing Citizens whose interests are now at stake, it will become, at an early day, not only safe against occasional competitions from abroad, but a source of domestic wealth, and even of external commerce.” Congress also ought to take up the question of what tariff policy would insulate America from reliance on foreigners for military necessities or other necessary items. The proposals Secretary of the Treasury Dallas soon submitted to Congress did not prove so high-minded.7

  Leading members of Congress paid particular attention to the following passage, in which the president told them he thought that institution ought to consider “the great importance of establishing throughout our country, the roads and Canals which can best be executed, under the national Authority.” Not only would such projects have economic benefits, but they would have “the political effect of … bringing and binding more closely together, the various parts of our extended confederacy.” The states had undertaken scattered projects of this kind, but the Federal Government might initiate “similar undertakings, requiring a national jurisdiction, and national means.…” In case the Old Republicans and committed Jeffersonians in Congress should balk at the idea, “it is a happy reflection,” Madison blithely told them, “that any defect of constitutional authority, which may be encountered, can be supplied in a mode, which the constitution itself has providently pointed out.” Surely no one could invoke the Constitution’s amendment provisions with as much authority as the chief author both of the unamended Constitution and of its first ten amendments.8 Unfortunately for all concerned, however, Madison’s hint went unheeded in Congress.

  As if a military buildup and construction of roads, canals, and bridges were not enough for Congress to finance, Madison came at the end of his address to an idea Jefferson and Washington had advocated unsuccessfully before him: “the establishment of a national seminary of learning within the District of Columbia.” Such an institution would contribute to the “advancement of knowledge, without which the blessings of liberty cannot be fully enjoyed,” and help both to inspire similar initiatives by the states and to diffuse culture.

  Madison’s address closed with a lengthy paragraph recognizing the “Superintending providence … to which [Americans] are indebted for … the happy lot of our country.” Their institutions had proven well suited for war, through which they had earned “a growing respect abroad.” Prospects seemed bright.

  Bright from Madison’s point of view, that is. John Randolph of Roanoke, on the other hand, back in the House after a one-term absence, spat out as the clerk finished reading the president’s message that the Republican president “out-Hamiltons Alexander Hamilton.”9

  The brightness gained strength from the absence from Congress of Virginia’s longtime senior senator, William Branch Giles. Though a prominent ally of Jefferson and Madison in the 1790s, Giles had been at odds with Jefferson regarding replacement of Federalist appointees in the Executive Branch at the beginning of the Jeffersonian era, and his disappointment with Madison’s having overlooked him in repeated Cabinet shuffles left him as an odd kind of duck: a non-Quid dissident Republican, aka Invisible, who often opposed the administration.10

  The new Congress saw Henry Clay back in the speaker’s chair and South Carolinian John C. Calhoun taking a leadership role with him.11 Both men favored the kind of active, nationalist program the president had recommended in his Annual Message, and Congress generally followed their, and Madison’s, lead. So, on February 26, 1816, Calhoun as chairman of a special committee delivered in the Committee of the Whole a learned speech on introducing the Bank Bill.12

  Those familiar with Calhoun only from his later Nullifier or Sectionalist phases will be surprised by the content of his Bank Bill speech.13 He began by putting constitutional issues involved in legislating a new bank into creation aside as “an useless consumption of time. The constitutional question,” he said, “had been already so freely and frequently discussed, that all had made up their minds on it.” The question whether banks were congenial to “liberty and prosperity,” he continued, had been rendered passé by “[t]he fact of the existence of banks.” Only the practical questions involved in chartering a new federal bank remained to be answered. Obviously a bank would be useful in managing the federal finances, he insisted, so what he intended to do was to consider the nature of the disorders of the Federal Government’s finances and “the question whether it was in the power of Congress, by establishing a National Bank, to remove those disorders.”

  As Calhoun spoke, he said, the one private bank in the United States at the time the Constitution was created had become two hundred sixty, and the $400,000 capital of the one had become two hundred times that much. “We have in lieu of gold and silver a paper medium, unequally but generally depreciated, which affects the trade and industry of the nation; which paralyzes the national arm, which sullies the faith, both public and private, of the United States.…” Passing this bill would restore these banks to their old function as “places of discount and deposit.” “Resolve,” the Carolinian insisted, “that every where there shall be an uniform value to the national currency; your constitutional control will then prevail.” By refusing to receive the notes of banks that did not pay specie or to give them government business, the Federal Government could at once wring the inflation out of the economy. “The disease,” he lectured, “arose in time of war—the war had subsided, but left the disease, which it was now in the power of Congress to eradicate.…” Omitting to do so would make Congress “abettors of a state of things which was of vital consequence to public morality.…”

  Here Calhoun’s position resembled the message Madison had issued in vetoing a bank bill in early 1814: that the bill “did not adequately invest the bank with the power to preserve a uniform (national) currency.”14 The bill passed the House 80–71 on March 13th, the Senate passed it with amendments on April 3rd, and the House accepted the Senate amendments on April 5th. Apparently satisfied that this new bill had no such flaw as that of 1814, Madison signed it into law on April 10th.15

  Another hotly contested issue of this Congress, salaries for members of Congress, also drew Calhoun into leadership. He spoke in the House the day after Speaker Henry Clay told members that “although his compensation, whilst he had enjoyed the honor of presiding in this House, was double that of other members, he declared, with the utmost sincerity, that he had never been able to make both ends meet at the termination of Congress,” even though he had in some instances attended Congress with only part of his family and sometimes without any of it.16 To this point members had received only per diem allowances, but Calhoun thought salaries necessary. “Whenever this House is properly composed, when it contains a sufficient number of men of ability, experience and integrity,” he held, “it of necessity will give direction to public affairs; but a weak and inexperienced House necessarily falls under executive control. The increased pay is calculated to draw men of abilities into this House; and, what is of equal importance, to keep them here till they are matured by experience.” He said he had witnessed no shortage of talent in the House, but that a lack of experience had often made itself felt. One cost of a congressional career that members ought to bear in mind when they voted was that unless a member were significantly wealthy, he likely would not be able to afford to bring his wife and children to Washington with him—and thus would be separated from them. This reality prevented many able members from continuing their service. The bill passed that day by a vote of 81–67, and President Madison signed it into law on March 19, 1816.17 Where formerly congressmen had received $6 per day for their service, they now received $1,500 per session. So unpopular was this reform that two-thirds of its House supporters lost in that year’s elections, and even Calhoun had to face a former congressman at the polls. Characteristically the young Carolinian rejected well-meaning counsel that he publicly apologize, but he yielded to the imperative to give public speeches on the subject in the two main population centers of his district. He was reelected.18

  Besides the Bank Bill and the congressional salaries law, Congress also enacted legislation in keeping with Madison’s call in his annual message for tariff protection and a buildup of the peacetime Department of War and Department of the Navy establishments. All this work done, President and Mrs. Madison departed for Montpelier on June 5th, not to return until October 9th—their longest absence from the capital since they had traveled there for James to take up the prime position in President Jefferson’s Cabinet.19