Having lodged one apparently fatal practical objection to Chief Justice Marshall’s opinion, Madison now reached the most powerful objection to it. “Those who recollect, and still more, those who shared in what passed in the State Conventions, thro’ which the people ratified the Constitution, with respect to the extent of the powers vested in Congress, can not easily be persuaded that the avowal of such a rule would not have prevented its ratification.” America was unique, Madison said, in that its government had been created popularly and that only the people could alter it, for which provision had been made in the constitution. “It is anxiously to be wished therefore,” he concluded, “that no innovations may take place in other modes; one of which would be a constructive assumption of powers never meant to be granted. If the powers granted be deficient, the legitimate source of additional ones is always open, and ought to be resorted to.” Thus wrote the author of the Bonus Bill Veto Message—and the man who had signed the bank into being.

  Madison added one last federalism-related point before concluding his little treatise on popular constitutionalism. The typical sovereign government must be understood as having all of the powers “necessary or useful,” lest the people suffer from its absence. In America, however, though the general government’s powers were limited, the state governments’ were not, and in fact, “the exercise of [a power] elsewhere [than by the general government] might be preferred by those who alone had a right to make the distribution.” The presumption should be that if the people wanted the distribution of powers altered, they would make the alteration by constitutional amendment. Roane agreed, and the dispute between Chief Justice Marshall and his Virginia countrymen had not ended.

  60

  If the Transcontinental Treaty and McCulloch v. Maryland were not enough momentous developments for one congressional session, the first weeks of 1819 also saw the beginning of what then and since has been recognized as the first great sectional crisis of the United States. The animating factors are hard to disentangle, but the chronology was simple enough.

  House Speaker Henry Clay, receiving a petition for statehood from citizens of the Missouri Territory, referred the petition to a committee. Doubtless he expected this to lead to a pro forma process of acceptance of the newest state into the federal union without any difficulty.

  Master of the House though he was, Clay miscalculated. In fairness to Clay, it is hard to see how he could have expected James Tallmadge Jr., then serving what proved to be his only term in the House, to gum up the works in this circumstance. Those who knew Tallmadge from New York were unsurprised, however: though a Republican, Tallmadge had gravitated to Governor DeWitt Clinton’s faction of the Republican Party, which generally resented Southern domination of the party and the Federal Government, rather than the opposition “Bucktails,” which took the opposite position. That he would propose an end to expansion of slavery across the North American landscape, beginning with Missouri in February 1819, did not surprise them at all.1

  Tallmadge’s proposal had two parts: prohibition of importation of any more slaves into Missouri and emancipation at age twenty-five of any slave born in Missouri after his proposal’s adoption. As historian Merrill D. Peterson put it, the Tallmadge amendment “raised serious questions about the constitutional authority of Congress, the nature of the Union, the future of the West, the morality of slavery, and the sectional balance of power.”2

  That the “anti-Missouri” impulse in Congress rested on political considerations came to be a common impression among Southern Republicans. That impression gained strength from the energetic part played in it by Senator Rufus King, F-NY, who had twice been his party’s nominee for vice president and once been its presidential candidate. Though King seems to have been authentically opposed to slavery, his biographer concedes in discussing his role in the Missouri controversy that “King’s interest in slavery was primarily political.” In fact, King had a record of objecting to extension of slavery into new territories in part because of opposition to, as he put it, “the present inequality, arising from the Representation of Slaves.”3

  Speaker Henry Clay shared this sentiment. He even said that he would be happy to see Congress bar slavery and would endorse freeing slaves who entered Missouri—if only Congress had constitutional authority to make such a policy. He denied that it did, however.4

  The House at first disagreed with the speaker. On February 16, 1819, it passed the part of Tallmadge’s amendment banning taking slaves into Missouri, 87–76; congressmen from the North favored the proposal by 86–10, while those from the South opposed it 66–1. Tallmadge’s other proposal, that slaves born in Missouri after statehood become free at age twenty-five, passed the House by only 82–78, with Northern congressmen supporting it by 80–14 and Southern ones opposing it 62–2. The Senate ultimately blocked both parts, the first by 22–16 and the second by 31–7. Of particular note is that the ban on introduction of new slaves into Missouri failed by the margin of five Northern senators’, including both Illinois senators’, votes against their section. When March 4, 1819, came, Tallmadge’s House career ended. So too did Missouri’s chance of joining the union as a state that year.5

  That day Representative Ephraim Bateman of New Jersey sent a circular letter—nineteenth-century analogue of congressional junk mail—to his constituents.6 After describing the Tallmadge Amendment and explaining that the Senate had struck it out, following which the bill had failed in the House, Bateman said he wanted to hear the public’s opinion of the matter. As for himself, he said he had thought “that a spirit of gradual emancipation had gone forth” and so was surprised to see extension of slavery into Missouri so vigorously advocated.

  Bateman told his constituents that he thought the answer to the question whether Missouri would have slavery would decide the issue for “the whole range of country west of the Mississippi,” so that “I cannot but consider it as a question of the greatest magnitude to the interest of humanity that was ever debated in the Congress of the United States.” He next explained that he did not see that the treaty with France guaranteeing to people in the Louisiana Territory the rights of other Americans barred Congress from excluding slavery from that territory, as a state would be able to do, and as indeed Congress had banned slavery from the Old Northwest. The popular Southern argument that diffusing slavery across the continent would ameliorate the condition of the slaves and make abolition of slavery in East Coast states more likely, Bateman wrote, “has little force in my mind.” Slavery already was legal in the region bounded by Pennsylvania, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, he noted, adding that this huge space was “surely sufficiently ample for every such purpose.” More land for slavery seemed certain to “increase the demand for, and raise the price of slaves,” strengthen incentives for smuggling slaves into the United States, “and blight all the hopes of an ultimate final emancipation of that unfortunate race of beings.” He concluded by observing that he was “compelled to believe, that the principle of slavery has of late taken still deeper root in some portions of our country” due to the high profits from Southern agricultural products.

  During the months between congressional sessions, antislavery organizations trumpeted the success in blocking Missouri statehood and worked to drum up opposition to Missouri statehood, with “innumerable public meetings organized in the Northern states by antislavery groups.” Southerners organized their own pro-Missouri gatherings once they realized what their opponents were doing. The December 1819 congressional session, with a narrow House anti-Missouri majority and a substantial pro-Missouri one in the Senate, would belabor the Missouri issue for three months.7

  President Monroe used the congressional recess to undertake another tour, this time of the South. He had begun preparing for this four-month sojourn at the end of November 1818, when he wrote a friend that “I contemplate a journey in the spring to the [South], as far as Georgia, & thence westward to the Missouri territory, back home thro’ Kentucky. I should be happy to descend the Miss[issippi], but fear that it will be too late in the season to admit of it.”8 He could combine his stated military and administrative aims with some matters of personal finance and electoral politics by going to Louisville during this journey, a Kentucky attorney explained to him at the beginning of March.9 Apparently Monroe at first contemplated following the coast from Washington all the way to New Orleans, but he changed his mind “under the apprehension that the season [would] not permit him to proceed so far along the coast.” He and Secretary Calhoun decided to depart on March 29th for Charleston, with Monroe to continue to Georgia before heading west as far as he could, and he expected to return to Washington by July 4th.10

  Monroe, Calhoun, and the Monroe family set out by steamship on March 30th. “A very heavy gale,” thunder, and lightning bade them godspeed.11 The City of Washington Gazette took a sardonic view, however. If Monroe did actually proceed all the way to St. Louis, on “a route of near 3,000 miles,” he would hardly have time to take in all of the fortifications, inlets, Indian settlements, military dispositions, and other such sights that it was his stated aim to see. Besides, “he could as well ascertain [what he needed to know about them] by a call on the respective departments, and investigate these various subjects, comfortably seated at his own fire side.… [T]he people do not expect or desire such a sacrifice of bodily fatigue from its venerable and respected chief magistrate. We see no national necessity for it.”12

  At Norfolk the presidential party received the same type of welcome as in most places along Monroe’s earlier tours. Monroe inspected the intended site of a new naval depot and witnessed the laying of the cornerstone of a new custom house, which culminated in the by-now-customary procession of a band and some musicians and signs of adoration from a large crowd. What made this particular event distinctive was the participation in the procession of the local Masons.13

  At Roanoke Island, Plymouth, Washington, and other stops in North Carolina, Monroe, Calhoun, and their companions made a good impression on those who came out to see the president. Bands played, politicians read messages of greeting, and the federal officials examined actual or potential military sites. In several places newspapers, diarists, and correspondents commented on “the manners of the President—unostentatious, mild and affable, he unites in his deportment the frank simplicity of a Republican citizen with the dignity which becomes the Chief of a great nation. His manners,” the Edenton Gazette concluded, “are as well fitted to win affection as his talents to command respect.”14 Monroe had found the sweet spot, it seems, between George Washington’s stilted levées and the extreme informality with which Thomas Jefferson had offended Minister Merry. As had people he encountered on his northern tour, Southerners saw in Monroe a last living embodiment of the Revolution, as welcoming committees repeatedly mentioned in their oral messages. For his part, the president happily indulged them in recalling those days of what the Plymouth, North Carolina, welcoming committee called “the first dawnings of your manhood.” He said to the Carolinians, “The zeal which animated me in that cause, of which you have generously expressed a favorable sentiment, was common to our fellow-citizens,” thereby at once denying that he had been anyone special among Continental Army soldiers and subtly underscoring his lifelong commitment to the republican cause.15

  By this point the form of reception of the president and his party into each town he entered had become standard. Monroe’s off-the-cuff responses to the addresses he received were similar as well. So, for example, William Alston, South Carolina’s largest landowner, lent the president his “elegant barge, which was rowed and steered by a competent number of respectable masters of vessels (who had volunteered their services) and over which proudly waved the star-spangled banner. As soon as the barge and boat accompanying it, made their appearance at the entrance of Sampit river [outside coastal Georgetown], a federal salute was fired from field pieces, manned by volunteer citizens.” Former congressman Benjamin Huger read Monroe a substantial address at “the house prepared for the President and his suite,” in which the most striking passage said:

  The arrival of the fifth President of the United States very naturally recalls to our recollection, a similar visit paid us some twenty years since, by the Father of his country, our beloved and never to be forgotten Washington. At that time the Constitution under which we live was in its infancy. It was his object to conciliate the feelings and reconcile the minds of the citizens to the new Federal Compact just brought into operation under his auspices. His success was complete.… You alone of his successors have judged it proper … to follow the example, and we fondly anticipate consequences equally beneficial to the community and gratifying to yourself.

  A florid account of America’s current situation and equally positive words about Monroe’s record as soldier, secretary, and president, as well as about his personality, followed. Monroe answered, “I concur in the sentiment which you have expressed, that the example of those to whose virtue and talents we are so much indebted should be the object of our constant attention, and that the very extraordinary services of him, who has been emphatically called the father of his country, give him a just claim to that venerated title.” He said that he had done his duty under a quite able predecessor and that though of course he admired those who had gone before, America’s liberty and prosperity owed most of all to the American people. A feast and toasts followed.16

  The president may have enjoyed or found some satisfaction in seeing the various elements of the southland’s geography. If so, that might have made up for the monotony of one florid address with the same elements as all the rest, to which he felt bound to respond, followed by dinner with various local potentates and, of a Sunday, religious services one after another. One development that may have stood out in his memory was the Charleston, South Carolina City Council’s decision to ask that President Monroe sit for a portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse, a prominent portraitist now better known to us as inventor of the telegraph and the eponymous code. Morse brought that request to the president’s attention, promising to take no more of his time than was necessary, when the latter had returned to Washington, and the president agreed to see Morse on December 11, 1819. In the end, however, it took Morse several White House visits to complete his work. As he explained to his mother, “He cannot sit more than ten or twenty minutes at a time, so that the moment I feel engaged he is called away again. I set my palette today at ten o’clock and waited until four in the afternoon before he came in. He then sat for ten minutes, and we were called to dinner.” Nonetheless the resulting portrait is now in the White House Collection.17

  Despite his absence from the Old Dominion and the federal capital, Monroe kept tabs on developments in them. His chief agent for this purpose, George Hay, he instructed, “You will … attend to the movement of parties, and likewise to public opinion, so as to be able to give me the best advice when we meet.” He complained that the Charleston locals’ expectations had made it “impossible to quit this place, without offending public opinion, & evidently slighting some objects meriting attention, without devoting to it a full week.” Whatever he might think, “The solicitude of the inhabitants to become acquainted with the Ch. Magistrate equalls what I experienced to the Eastward.”18

  Monroe took advantage of a prime opportunity for tamping down party animosity while in Charleston. There General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a Philadelphia Convention delegate and past Federalist presidential nominee, besides being a member of one of South Carolina’s two leading political dynasties, helped him negotiate the Charleston social scene. “Genl. P.,” the president wrote, “participates in the fatigues, which is the more honorable on his part, and friendly to me, as his career is finish’d, being 68 years of age, & having no view to public life.” After describing his connections to a number of prominent Pinckneys during and since the Revolution, Monroe noted of General Thomas Pinckney—like nearly all other Pinckneys, a Federalist—that “[h]is services in the late war, while party spirit ran so high, was a proof of the confidence of the govt. & of his patriotism.” Monroe thought it would do good for Hay to put “a paragraph” in a newspaper about Monroe’s good relations with the Pinckneys. Whatever others might think of it, he explained, “It is an illustration of the principles on which I act.” He was “inclined,” he said, “to think that such a paragh. would have conciliatory effect, in drawing the country together, shaking the foundation of party animosities, on just principles.” “My great object,” he closed, “is to bring the country together on just principles.…”

  The Charleston Courier said as the president left town that “We rejoice in the opportunity which has been afforded us, of an interview with the Chief of our Republic; whose modest greatness reminds us of the heroism and the humility of the Ancient Patriots of Rome.”19 As we have seen, the president’s manner commonly made this impression on people. A contemporary stranger’s physical description of him said, “[T]he present President of the United States is a large and tall man of dark Complexion & blue eyes & a very grave countenance—and in no wise [foppish] but plane.… His dress was blue Broadcloth coat & pantaloons, a light coloured waist coat and a common beaver Hat &c.”20