A History of the American People Part 5

We must now look forward a little to a.s.sess the full significance of this remarkable man and his impact on American history. If one man can be said to have wedded the United States indissolubly to capitalism, and particularly to industrial capitalism, it was Marshall. Except for Hamilton, all the Founding Fathers, Adams included, were suspicious of capitalism, or suspicious of banks anyway; some hated banks. And the Southerners hated industry. Even Was.h.i.+ngton disliked Hamilton's report on manufactures. But Marshall approved of capitalism, he approved of banks, he approved of industry-the lot. He thought they were essential to the future wellbeing of the United States people and that therefore their existence must be guaranteed under the Const.i.tution. It was, as he saw it, his job as chief justice to insure this. Marshall, like the Founding Fathers, put his trust in property as the ultimate guarantor of liberty. But, unlike the Fathers, he did not distinguish morally and const.i.tutionally between types of property.

The Founders, particularly the Virginians, Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, et al., equated property, as a moral force, with land. Their views were articulated by John Taylor (1753-1824), like them a Virginia landowner who served in the Senate and published in 1814 a monumental work of 700 pages, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the United States. Taylor distinguished between 'natural' property, such as land, and 'artificial property' created by legal privilege, of which banking wealth was the outstanding example. He saw the right to issue paper money as indirect taxation on the people: 'Taxation, direct or indirect, produced by a paper system in any form, will rob a nation of property without giving it liberty; and by creating and enriching a separate interest, will rob it of liberty without giving it property.' Paper-money banking benefited an artificially created and parasitical financial aristocracy at the expense of the hard-working farmer, and this 'property-transferring policy invariably impoverishes all laboring and productive cla.s.ses.' He compared this new financial power with the old feudal and ecclesiastical power, with the bankers using 'force, faith and credit' as the two others did religion and feudality. What particularly infuriated Taylor was the horrible slyness with which financiers had invested 'fict.i.tious' property, such as bank-paper and stock, with all the prestige and virtues of 'honest' property.

Taylor's theory was an early version of what was to become known as the 'physical fallacy,' a belief that only those who worked with their hands and brains to raise food or make goods were creating 'real' wealth and that all other forms of economic activity were essentially parasitical. It was commonly held in the early 19th century, and Marx and all his followers fell victim to it. Indeed plenty of people hold it in one form or another today, and whenever its adherents acquire power, or seize it, and put their beliefs into practice, by oppressing the 'parasitical middleman,' poverty invariably follows. Taylor's formulation of the theory fell on a particularly rich soil because American farmers in general, and the Southerners and backwoodsmen in particular, already had a paranoid suspicion of the 'money power' dating from colonial times, as we have seen. So Taylor's arguments, suitably vulgarized, became the common coin of the Jeffersonians, later of the Jacksonians and finally of silver-standard Democrats and populists of the late 19th century, who claimed that the American farmer was being 'crucified on a cross of gold.' The persistence of this fallacy in American politics refutes the common a.s.sumption that America is resistant to ideology, for if ever there were an ideology it is this farrago.

Fortunately Marshall set his face against it, and he had the power-or rather he acquired the power-to make his views law. His view of how the American Republic should function was clear and consistent. He had read Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France as soon as it was published in America and it inspired in him a healthy revulsion against the mob which lasted till his dying day. The people might not always const.i.tute a mob. But they were always to be distrusted as an unfettered political force. The role of the Const.i.tution therefore was to fence the people in. In Marshall's a.n.a.lysis, the popular power in America was essentially vested in the states, for they had been the first, in his own lifetime, to enfranchise the ma.s.ses. Hence he was not only a federalist but a centralist, who thought the primary role of the general government was to balance the power of the mob which was latent in the states. The Const.i.tution may not have said this explicitly. But the thought was implicit in its provisions, and it was the role and duty of the federal judiciary to reveal the hidden mysteries of the Const.i.tution by its decisions. Thus he a.s.serted, for the first time, the right of the Supreme Court to play its full part in the const.i.tutional process by its powers of interpretation. As he put it in one of his judgments, 'We must never forget it is a Const.i.tution we are expounding ... something organic, capable of growth, susceptible to change.' Marshall was a graceful persuader with a subtle and resourceful mind, fertile in sinewy arguments, expressed with a silver tongue and a pen of gold. He lived very close to his brethren during the six or eight weeks the court sat in Was.h.i.+ngton, all of them residing together in the same modest boarding house so that, as his biographer said, Marshall was 'head of a family as much as he was chief of a court. He was absolutely dominant among his colleagues, though less learned than some of them. During his thirty-four years as head of the court it laid down 1,100 rulings, 519 of which he wrote himself, and he was in a dissenting minority only eight times.

Next to Burke, Marshall revered Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. He was closer to its spirit than Hamilton, believing the state should be chary of interfering in the natural process of the economy. Left to themselves, and with the law holding the ring so that all were free to exert the utmost of their powers, industrious men and women were capable unaided of fructifying America's vast resources and making it the richest country on earth. It was capitalism, not the state, which would conquer, tame, and plant the Mississippi Valley and still further west. All it required was a just, sensible, and consistent legal framework so that entrepreneurs could invest their capital and skills with confidence. Marshall had none of Taylor's reluctance to acknowledge 'artificial' property. It was the market, not sentiment, which defined wealth, provided it were honestly acquired. It was the duty of the court so to interpret the Const.i.tution that the rights of property of all kinds were properly acknowledged, and capitalism thus enabled to do its job of developing the vast territories which Almighty G.o.d, in his wisdom, had given the American people just as he had once given the Promised Land to the Israelites.

In this work, Marshall saw it as his primary function to provide property with the security which (in his view) was increasingly threatened by the legislatures of the states with their one-man, one-vote democracy and their consequent exposure to the demagoguery of irresponsible and propertyless men. That meant making the muscle of the Supreme Court felt in every state capital-and indeed in Congress itself. He set the parameters for his work as early as 1803, when in Marbury v. Madison he a.s.serted the const.i.tutional power of the Court to engage in judicial review of both state and federal legislation and, if needs be, to rule it unconst.i.tutional. Viewing, as he did, the Const.i.tution as an instrument of national unity and safety, he claimed that it not only set forth specific powers but created its own sanctions by implied powers. These sanctions were particularly necessary when, with the spread of the suffrage, politicians made populist a.s.saults on lawful property to curry favor with the mob. To Marshall it made little difference whether an actual rabble stormed the Bastille by force or a legislative rabble tried to take it by unconst.i.tutional statute. His first great blow for property came in 1810 in Fletcher v. Peck, when he overturned the popular verdict by ruling that a contact was valid whatever ordinary men might think of its ethics. Fourteen years later, in the key case of Gibbons v. Ogden, he struck a lasting blow for entrepreneurial freedom by ruling that a state legislature had no const.i.tutional right to create a steamboat monopoly. This interpretation of the Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8) of the Const.i.tution insisted that the US Congress was supreme in all aspects of interstate commerce and could not be limited by state law in that area. He wrote: 'The subject is as completely taken from the state legislatures as if they had been expressly forbidden to act on it.

In 1819 alone there were three cardinal Marshall rulings in favour of property. Early in February his Court ruled, in Sturges v. Crownins.h.i.+eld, that a populist New York State bankruptcy law in favor of debtors violated the Const.i.tution on contracts. The same month, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the Court laid down that a corporation charter was a private contract which was protected from interference by a state legislature. The most important case came in March, in a battle between the state of Maryland and the federal bank, or rather its Maryland branch. In McCulloch v. Maryland the Court had to rule not only on the right of a state to tax a federal inst.i.tution but on the right of Congress to set up a federal bank in the first place. The judgment came down with tremendous majesty on the side of the central power, and the lawful status of the federal bank, which thus survived and flourished, until the great populist Andrew Jackson-the rabble incarnate and enthroned, in Marshall's view-destroyed it.

In the light of subsequent history, it is easy for us to applaud Marshall's work as saving the United States from the demagogic legislative and governmental follies which made property insecure in Latin America, and so kept it poor and backward. Marshall's rulings made the acc.u.mulation of capital possible on a scale hitherto unimaginable and he can justly be described as one of the architects of the modern world. But it did not seem so at the time to Jefferson and his friends. To Jefferson's delight, John Taylor himself lambasted the Court's ruling in McCulloch as an 'outrageous' vindication of 'artificial' property. Taylor's p.r.o.nouncement, wrote Jefferson, was 'the true political faith, to which every catholic republican should steadfastly hold.' He saw Marshall and his Court as the dedicated enemies of American republicanism: 'The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our Const.i.tution from a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone.'

However, it must not be thought the supporters of a strong central authority had it all their own way. On the contrary. Federalism, as a political movement, was a declining force round the turn of the century, precisely because it was a party of the elite, without popular roots, at a time when democracy was spreading fast among the states and thus beginning to determine the federal executive power too. Adams' valedictory appointment of Marshall as chief justice was a huge blow struck for the federalist principle but Adams was the last of the federalist presidents and he could not get himself re-elected. He was very much in two minds whether to run. Not only did he hate Was.h.i.+ngton and the horrible, damp presidential mansion, he also thought the job intolerable-the President. he warned his son (also in time an uneasy president), 'has a very hard, laborious and unhappy life.' He laid down: 'No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.' He ran a second time because he did not want Jefferson to hold the job. There was nothing personal in this: Jefferson was one of the few politicians whom Adams did not actually hold in contempt-liked him, in fact, albeit they were totally different in views and styles of life. But Adams thought Jefferson's view of the Const.i.tution and role of government wholly mistaken-the two men were 'the North and South Poles of the American Revolution'-and he was terrified Jefferson's sentimentality would involve America in a war on France's side which would inevitably lead to conflict with Britain and the destruction of New England's trade.

So Adams ran-and much good it did him. A few weeks before the election, Hamilton, his fellow-federalist and ex-colleague, published an extraordinary pamphlet, A Letter from Alexander Hamilton Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams Esq, President of the United States. It began, 'Not denying to Mr Adams patriotism and integrity and even talents of a certain kind,' and went on to a.s.sert that he was 'unfit for the office of Chief Magistrate,' on account of his eccentricity, lack of sound judgment, inability to persevere, 'vanity beyond bounds,' and 'a jealousy capable of discoloring every subject. The pamphlet was so violent that it has been described as an act of political suicide on Hamilton's part, indicating he was quite unsuited to high office himself. But there is no denying that it harmed Adams too. To be fair to Hamilton, he intended it for private circulation among federalist leaders but (as was foreseeable) it fell into enemy hands, in the shape of Aaron Burr, who promptly insured it had the widest possible circulation.

Adams was in a lot of other trouble in any case. In the age of the French Revolution, which had its unscrupulous agents and credulous sympathizers in every civilized country, America, like Britain, had felt obliged to take steps to protect itself. In 1798 Congress had pa.s.sed, with Adams' approval, the Alien and Sedition Acts. These four measures limited freedom of the press and speech and restricted the activities of aliens, especially French and Irish. They were part of the paranoia of the decade, which infected both sides of the revolutionary argument and predictably led to ludicrous results. In the first case which came before the courts, Luther Baldwin of New Jersey was convicted and fined $100 for wis.h.i.+ng that a wad from the presidential saluting-cannon might 'hit Adams in the a.s.s.' As in England, ordinary people cared little about such measures, which affected only the chattering cla.s.ses. But Jefferson, albeit a member of the government, and his friend Madison, drafted a series of resolutions, pa.s.sed by the Virginia legislature and copied in Kentucky, which a.s.serted that the Acts were unconst.i.tutional and that the states 'have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting of the evil.' The proper remedy, they went on, was for individual states to proceed to the 'nullification' of 'such unauthorised acts.' This is the first we hear of the Doctrine of Nullification, which was to haunt the republic for decades to come. At the time it had less public impact than the increases in taxation made inevitable by Adams' construction of a substantial navy, especially a direct tax on houses, slaves, and land, which hit farmers, planters, and city-dwellers alike, and even provoked a feeble insurrection known to historians as Fries' Rebellion.

The 1800 election is often referred to as the first contested presidential election but evidence of the contest is scarce. Jefferson, true to his determination to 'stand' rather than 'run,' remained at his home, Monticello, throughout. Adams, now toothless, was incapable of making a public speech. The issue was decided by Jefferson's standing mate, Burr, whose Tammany organization carried New York, the swing state. So Jefferson beat Adams by seventy-three votes to sixty-five. But Burr also got seventy-three votes and under the Const.i.tution the House had to decide which of them was president. After much skulduggery, the federalists voted for Jefferson, after private a.s.surances that he would allow many federalist office-holders to keep their jobs.

Jefferson, the exalted idealist, thus began his presidency with a bit of a deal. Indeed it was his fate all his public life to be forced-some would say that he chose-to compromise in order to obtain his objectives. He was a means-justifies-the-end casuist. He owed his presidency not just to Burr, who was manifestly a political crook and the first machine-politician in America, but to Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) of Ma.s.sachusetts, who was the second, and, as governor of the state, the inventor of gerrymandering. Jefferson raises a lot of difficulties for the historian. He is fascinating because of the range of his activities, the breadth of his imaginative insights, and the fertility of his inventions. But his inconsistencies are insurmountable and the deeper they are probed the more his fundamental weaknesses appear. Jefferson suffered from what were clearly psychosomatic migraines all his life-and many other ills, real and imaginary, too; he was a monumental hypochondriac-and these tended to increase, as the dislocations in his personality, beliefs, and practices became more p.r.o.nounced.

Jefferson's fundamental difficulty can be simply explained: he was a pa.s.sionate idealist, to some extent indeed an intellectual puritan, but at the same time a sybarite, an art-lover, and a fastidious devotee of all life's luxuries. From claret to concubinage, there was no delight he did not sample, or rather indulge in habitually. This set his views and practices in constant conflict. Slavery was a case in point: its dark shadow penetrates every corner of his long life. One should be very careful in judging the Virginia Founding Fathers without making the imaginative leap into their minds on this issue. Slavery, to those involved in it as planters, was not just a commercial, economic, and moral issue: it was an intimate part of their way of life. The emotional vibrations it set up in their lives (and in the lives of their household slaves) are almost impossible for us to understand. But we have to accept that they were subtly compounded of love and fear, self-indulgence and self-disgust, friends.h.i.+p and affection, and (not least) family ties. When Jefferson married the rich widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, and brought her to Monticello, then already a-building, it is likely that he had a black mistress installed there as a household servant. When Martha's father, John Wayles, died, she inherited 11,000 acres and fourteen slaves. Wayles had had a mulatto mistress, Betty Hemings, by whom he had quadroon children who, under the laws of Virginia, were slaves by birth. So Jefferson's wife was in intimate daily contact not only with her own servile half-brothers and sisters, one of whom at least worked in the house, but with her husband's concubine. Some Southern white women put up with this kind of thing, others were deeply grieved, others seemed unconcerned. What Jefferson thought we do not know-in all his voluminous writings he never discusses his own s.e.xual relations with black or colored women. But he was clearly torn in two. We know he came to hate miscegenation, as the source of endless misery for all concerned.

He also hated slavery, feared it, reviled it, privately at least, and sought in vain both to curtail it publicly and to cut it out of his own life. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) is such an outspoken denunciation of slavery on almost every ground that he told James Monroe that he hesitated to publish it, because 'the terms in which I speak of slavery and of our Const.i.tution [in Virginia] may produce an irritation which will revolt the minds of our countrymen against the reform of these two articles, and thus do more harm than good.' He argued that slavery was not just an economic evil, which destroyed 'industry,' but a moral one which degraded the slave-owners even more than the slave. He wanted outright abolition, and none of the future abolitionists from the North argued more fervently or more comprehensively against the 'peculiar inst.i.tution.' Friends, including Virginians, urged him to publish and he did so, insuring that a number of copies were put in the library of William and Mary College, so that the young would read it.

Though an emanc.i.p.ationist in theory, however, Jefferson did nothing in practice to end slavery, either as governor of Virginia or as the revisor of its law-code. Nor, as secretary of state, as vice-president, or as a two-term president, did he do anything effective to end the slave-trade. He accepted the Southern contention that emanc.i.p.ated slaves could never be allowed to live as freemen in the Southern states. The liberated blacks would have to form a separate and independent country-preferably in Africa-to which 'we should extend our alliance and protection.' One reason Jefferson shared this Southern view was that he agreed with most Southern whites that blacks were quite different and in some ways inferior. They 'secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.' They 'require less sleep.' Their s.e.xual desires are 'more ardent' but lack 'the tender, delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation' displayed by whites. They are 'much inferior' in reason, though equal in memory. Jefferson said he had never heard of a black person who could paint a picture, write a musical composition, or 'discover a truth.' He thought it would not be possible to find any 'capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.' Jefferson, one need hardly say, was not a bigoted racist. One of the grand things about him was that he was always open-minded to new evidence. It is significant that he disagreed with virtually all Americans of his day in rating the Indians as the equals of the whites in ability. And when he was sent specimens of mathematical work by Benjamin Banneker, a free black planter in Maryland, he not only altered his views on this point but gleefully sent the ma.n.u.script off to the Marquis de Condorcet, secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences, saying he was 'happy to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro ... who is a very respectable mathematician.' Jefferson hoped that more Bannekers would emerge to prove that any apparent inferiority of blacks 'does not proceed from any differences in the structure of the parts on which the intellect depends' but 'is merely the effect of their degraded condition.' He did not, however, change his opinion that freed blacks could not remain in the South.

Nor did Jefferson ever get round to doing anything for his own slaves, such as emanc.i.p.ating them. The reason was pitifully simple: money. Jefferson was never in a financial condition to indulge his conscience. Indeed, in an unsuccessful attempt to increase the income from his estates, he actually bought more slaves. When one of his slaves ran away he offered a reward for his capture. When he was about to return from his emba.s.sy to Paris, and his black slave-cook wished to remain there as a freeman, Jefferson persuaded him to come back to Monticello as a slave-he could not afford to lose the cook's 'artistry.' He wrote: 'The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the more boisterous pa.s.sions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other ... indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that G.o.d is just, that his justice cannot sleep for ever.' But if Jefferson's principles were strong, his appet.i.tes were stronger. And his debts were stronger still. Jefferson borrowed money all his life and, however much he hated the English, his indebtedness to two large London banking houses steadily increased. It is a curious and not entirely explicable fact that Southern slave-holding and indebtedness went together. The fact that a s.h.i.+p, from Boston or London itself-or France-could easily call at the plantation wharf and deposit on credit the latest European delicacies and luxuries was a standing temptation few Southern gentlemen could resist. Jefferson's temptations were more complex than most of his peers, for in addition to French wines, brandies, liqueurs and cheeses, hams and pates, vintage port from Bristol, coats and s.h.i.+rts from Savile Row, and porcelain from Wedgewood and Doulton, there were endless books, some of them very expensive, acc.u.mulating to form the finest library, 15,000 volumes, on the western side of the Atlantic. All these, and the growing interest on the debts, had to be paid for by the sweat of his slaves.

Jefferson's expensive tastes might not have proved so fatal to his principles had he not also been an amateur architect of astonis.h.i.+ng persistence and eccentricity. Architecture always tells us a great deal about the political state of a nation. This maxim has never been better ill.u.s.trated than in America during the last quarter of the 18th century and the first of the 19th. And, in this general ill.u.s.tration, Jefferson and his Monticello provide a vivid particular example. Even more than its growing wealth, the new self-confidence felt in America just before, during, and still more after the Revolution and the securing of Independence, expressed itself in ambitious building-programs by its planter aristocracy (and their city a.s.sociates) who now saw themselves as a ruling cla.s.s. As befits their Roman republican principles, their taste was overwhelmingly cla.s.sical. They went back for models both to antiquity and to Renaissance reinterpretations of cla.s.sical forms. In particular they looked to Palladio. His Four Books of Architecture, published (1738) in English translation, lavishly ill.u.s.trated by his designs, must have been in more American gentlemen's libraries than any other book of its kind. Palladio popularized a two-story pedimented portico, with ionic columns on the lower level and doric columns above. He also favored the so-called 'colossal portico' where vast columns arise without interruption from the floor of the porch to the pediment and roof.

Cla.s.sical villas were going up steadily in America in the years just before the break with England-the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts (1759) for instance or Mount Pleasant (1763), on the Schuylkill, described by John Adams as 'the most elegant country seat in the Northern colonies.' Also on the Schuylkill was Landsdowne, erected by Governor Penn of Pennsylvania, the first to introduce Palladio's two-storied pedimented portico. It was widely imitated and, when Independence came, this flamboyant architectural device, and the still more impressive colossal portico, became, and remain, symbols of America's triumphant discovery of itself. Some of these swagger-houses were built from scratch. Others, like Was.h.i.+ngton's own Mount Vernon, had a huge portico added (1777-84). An even bigger swagger-portico was added to Woodlands, the magnificent mansion built by the politician William Hamilton in 1787-90. With the end of the war, the creation of the Const.i.tution, and, still more, the establishment of an efficient central government and the recovery of American credit, the pa.s.sion for villa-building intensified. The Schuylkill, near America's richest city, Philadelphia, like the Thames to the west of London, was soon dotted with these delectable edifices, every few hundred yards.

The Schuylkill villa-rush became a positive stampede in 1793 when the worst outbreak of yellow fever in America's history killed one in ten of Philadelphia's inhabitants. Between 1793 and 1810 scores of villas emerged, each with its own pleasure-gardens or landscaped park, so that, said a visitor, 'The countryside [near Philadelphia] is very pleasant and agreeable, finely interspersed with genteel country seats, fields and orchards, for several miles around.' That is exactly the impression the new American ruling cla.s.s wished to convey. None more so than Jefferson, who studied and practiced not only statesmans.h.i.+p but architecture all his life. Unfortunately, his divided nature, the simultaneous existence in his personality of incompatible opposites, his indecisiveness, his open-mindedness and changeability, combined to turn his building activities, especially at Monticello, into a nightmare saga. His plan to create a Palladian villa of his own design first unfolded in 1768 and work continued for virtually the rest of his life, the building being finished, insofar as it ever was, in the winter of 1823-4.

It is just as well that Jefferson had no sense of humor: he const.i.tutes in his own way an egregious comic character, accident-p.r.o.ne and vertiginous, to whom minor catastrophes accrued. Almost from the start, the house was lived in, and guests invited there, though it was, by grandee standards, uninhabitable. When Jefferson became president, work on the house had proceeded for over thirty years, but half the rooms were unplastered and many had no flooring. One guest, Anna Maria Thornton, was surprised to find the upper floor reached by 'a little ladder of a staircase ... very steep' (it is still there). On the second floor, where she slept, the window came down to the ground so there was no privacy but it was so short she had to crouch to see the view. The entrance hall had a clock perched awkwardly over the doorway, driven by cannon-ball weights in the corners, and with a balcony jutting out at the back.

The house was full of ingenious but amateurish Heath Robinson devices such as this, many of which do not work to this day. The library consisted not of shelves but of individual boxes stacked on top of each other, a weird arrangement. The dining-room looked into the tea-room and was only closed off by gla.s.s doors, shut in cold weather. The Dome Room proved an insoluble problem. There was no way to heat it, as a chimney flue would have marred its external appearance-the whole point of its existence-so Jefferson could not install a stove. Hence it was never used. The ice-house, attached to the main building, must have been one of the most awkward structures ever devised. It was filled, unusually, by cisterns but they were riddled by leaks and in Jefferson's day only two out of four ever held water. The chimneys proved too low and blew smoke into the house; the fires smoked too and gave out little heat. Jefferson was too jealous of Count Rumford's fame to install a 'Rumford,' the first really elegant drawing-room fireplace, so much admired by Jane Austen. He insisted on producing his own design, which did not work. The bedrooms were mere alcoves. Jefferson was constantly being delivered the wrong wood, or too much wood, or too little wood, and when he got the right wood one of several fires destroyed the kiln for drying it. As originally built, his bedroom accorded him no privacy at all, a curious oversight considering he had a pa.s.sion for being alone and un.o.bserved. Thereafter the search for privacy became an obsession in the many changes of design, and in the end he built two large porticoes, which did not fit into the Palladian design at all and were merely screens for his bedroom. Contemporaries a.s.sumed they were there so that his alleged mistress, Sally Herrings, could slip in and out of his chamber un.o.bserved. Whether this was so we cannot now judge because they were removed in 1890.

His workmen, Messrs Neilson, Stewart, Chisholm, Oldham, and Dinsmore, required infinite patience as Jefferson changed his mind repeatedly. Often a finished bit had to be redone to accommodate a new gimmick Jefferson had just invented-a concealed miniature lift to haul wine up from the cellars into the dining-room, for example, or a mysterious pulley-system which, in theory, made the tea-room doors open of their own accord. On the other hand, Jefferson conveyed his ever changing instructions to them in copious letters, written on terms of complete equality. And many of the workmen were incompetent anyway. Richard Richardson, his carpenter-columnist, could not get the columns of the swagger-portico straight, despite many tries. Jefferson was very forgiving. He was also good-natured. When he was president, he was expected by Oldham to look after his petty financial affairs in Was.h.i.+ngton, and Jefferson cheerfully obliged.

The total cost of the house over more than half a century must have been enormous but it is impossible to compute the exact or even an approximate sum. All his life, Jefferson kept accounts, lists, and records in overwhelming quant.i.ty, covering all his activities in minute detail. His financial records are particularly copious. Yet, as they do not epitomize or balance, they convey little useful information. With a bit of research, Jefferson could have discovered, down to the last cent, what he had spent on any day of his life. But he never knew what he was worth or how much he was in debt. As he told his secretary, William Short, his true financial position remained a mystery to him. It was in fact deplorable and grew steadily worse from the 1770s onwards. As the editors of his memorandum books put it, 'The daily ritual of recording pecuniary events gave Jefferson an artificial sense of order in his financial world.' In this respect Jefferson's accounts were a microcosm of the present-day federal budget, listing every detail of expenditure in tens of thousands of pages and millions of words, which obscures the fact that the government is adding to the national debt at the rate of $10,000 a second.

The story of Jefferson's financial downfall is a melancholy one. He should have saved money when he was president, living free and earning $25,000 annually for eight years. But he left office more in debt than when he entered it, and over $10,000 more than he thought. He a.s.signed $2,500 a year, the income from his Bedford estates-half his landed profits-to pay the debts off; but they mysteriously rose. In 1815 he negotiated with Congress to sell them his library for $24,000, to form the basis of the Library of Congress. But this cleared less than half his borrowings, which then began to rise again. It was not all his fault. In 1819 William Carey Nicholas, the rascally father-in-law of Jefferson's grandson, Jefferson Randolph, pressured him into endorsing notes for $20,000. The next year Nicholas defaulted and Jefferson became liable for the lot. This coincided with the financial collapse of 1819 which made it impossible for Jefferson to sell lands and slaves, now his only option. In his last years visitors noticed that Monticello was 'old and going to decay,' the gardens 'slovenly.' His attempt to sell it in a lottery failed and when he died his debts were over $100,000. Jefferson's original plan had been to give all his slaves manumission at his death. That had to be sc.r.a.pped. Jefferson Randolph, as heir, felt he had no alternative but to sell his grandfather's 130 slaves in 1827, splitting up families and separating mothers and children in the process, to achieve the maximum cash total. The next year he tried to sell Monticello itself, but there were no bidders and the house was vandalized. It is a miracle that it survived at all. Happily in 1834 it came into the hands of the Levy family, who maintained it for ninety years until, in the fullness of time (1923), it was bought by the Jefferson Memorial Foundation for $500,000. Now it is restored and glorious and a Historic Home-and a remarkable monument to the divided nature and peculiarities of its ill.u.s.trious begetter.

In the light of this saga of debt, it is amazing that Jefferson was as good a president as he contrived to be. In fact he managed to reduce the national debt by 30 percent. This was no doubt mainly due to the continuing effects of Hamilton's refunding measures, but Jefferson's minimalist ideas of central government had something to do with it too. Once Jefferson took up office, all the ceremonial grandeur of the Was.h.i.+ngton presidency, kept up by Adams, was sc.r.a.pped. We hear no more of the white coach. Dress swords were discarded. Jefferson traveled on horseback and his clothes were plain, not to say slovenly at times. Not only was he unguarded, his house in Was.h.i.+ngton was open to all-comers. One visitor reported that he arrived at eight o'clock in the morning, without any letters of introduction, and was immediately shown into the President's study, where he was received with courtesy and left 'highly pleased with the affability, intelligence and good sense of the President of America.

What is perhaps even more remarkable is that Jefferson let it be known that anyone could write to him with their suggestions, observations, or complaints, and that their letters would receive his individual attention. All they had to pay was the cost of the paper and the ink, as Jefferson agreed to pay the postage on receipt. This was an astonis.h.i.+ng concession, for depending on the distance, postage then cost from 8 to 35 cents for each sheet of paper, at a time when laborers worked for a dollar a day. The President's generosity encouraged prolixity, many correspondents writing him letters of a dozen sheets or more. Though Jefferson had a secretary, he insisted on opening, reading, answering, and filing all these letters himself. As he never in his life threw anything away, they are all still in existence and many of them have recently been edited. Jefferson's replies, registered on a smudged copier or traced by a more efficient polygraph of his own devising, have also survived.

The letters the President received were political ('Thomas Jefferson, you infernal villun'), supplication for office ('Could it be possible to Give a Youth of my Age the Appointment of a Mids.h.i.+pman in the Navy?'-this purporting to come from four-year-old Thomas Jefferson Ga.s.saway), pleas from widows ('You will no Doubt think Me posest of a Deal of asureance for adressing you, but Neacesary has no Law'), requests for money ('The hope which is kindled from the very ashes of despair alone emboldens me to address you'), appeals from imprisoned debtors and victims of miscarriages of justice ('I Rote to you for a.s.sistance not for Reles.e.m.e.nt'), death threats which read as though they had been written by the young Tom Sawyer ('The retributive SWORD is suspended over your Head by a slender Thread-BEWARE!') and pure abuse ('Thomas Jefferson you are the d.a.m.nedest fool that G.o.d put life into, G.o.d dam you'). Taken together, these letters give an extraordinarily vivid glimpse into American lives in the first decade of the 19th century. All except the merely abusive got a reply in Jefferson's hand, even anonymous writers receiving this courtesy provided they gave some sort of address. Some of the replies were long and detailed, some contained money, others embodied careful inquiry into a particular grievance or request. Jefferson was not the only great man to take trouble with correspondents. His contemporary the Duke of Wellington also replied to thousands of letters, most of them from strangers, in his own hand, often by return of post. But Jefferson's conscientious care is without parallel-he was a man of truly heroic civility.

Just occasionally the attention the President paid to his correspondence proved invaluable. He wrote: 'I consider anonymous letters as sufficient foundation for inquiry into the facts they communicate.' On December 11, 1805 he received one such, signed 'Your Friend,' seeking 'to give you a warning about Burr's intrigues ... be thoroughly persuaded B. is a new Catilina.' Burr, as Jefferson had long known, was an unscrupulous adventurer and he was most embarra.s.sed to have such a rogue as his vice-president during his first term. He forced Burr to keep his distance and the only occasion when the Vice-President came into prominence was when he presided, ex officio, at the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase (1741-1811). It was Jefferson's greatest grievance against his predecessor that Adams had filled up all the court vacancies with ardent federalists, some of them being appointed only days before he left office. Chase was particularly obnoxious to Jefferson's party and his overbearing manner and abusive remarks while judging cases arising out of the hated Alien and Sedition Acts led to a demand for his impeachment in 1804, which Jefferson foolishly encouraged. It is the only time Congress has ever attempted to remove a member of the Supreme Court in this way and the episode demonstrated painfully that impeachment is not an effective method of trying to curb the Court for political reasons. Burr did not distinguish himself and the process failed. He was, accordingly, dropped from the ticket when Jefferson was reelected, George Clinton being chosen instead.

As it happened, even before the election Burr was secretly engaged in various anti-Union intrigues, notably a plan by Senator Timothy Pickering and Ma.s.sachusetts hardliners to take New England out of the Union. They wanted New York with them too, obviously, and for this purpose it was necessary to get Burr elected governor of the state. But Hamilton frustrated this scheme on the grounds that Burr was 'a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted with reins of government.' These remarks got into print and Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey (July 11, 1804). Hamilton strongly disapproved of dueling but felt he could not in honor decline the challenge. His conscience, however, forbade him to shoot at his opponent. Burr killed him without compunction, thus removing from the chessboard of American power one of its most baroque and unpredictable pieces.

Burr went into hiding in Virginia, reemerged, went west, and there embarked on a series of plots to create a new, independent state from Spanish Mexico. Such schemes seem childish to us. But they were not uncommon as the Spanish-American empire disintegrated during these years and romantic adventurers abounded. (Not for nothing did the young Lord Byron consider joining in the scramble for pieces of Spain's rotting imperial flesh.) Burr went further, however, and sought to detach parts of Trans-Appalachian America to join his proposed kingdom. This was treason against the United States, and Jefferson, forewarned, had him arrested and charged. The trial took place in 1807 under Chief Justice Marshall, who, as we have seen, was no friend of the President. It was a highly partisan affair. To embarra.s.s the President, Marshall allowed him to be subpoenaed to appear, and testify under oath. Jefferson refused, invoking, for the first time, executive privilege. Marshall countered by placing a narrow construction on the const.i.tutional law of treason and Burr was acquitted. That was the end of him as a political figure, however, and the episode demonstrated that even a states' rights president like Jefferson was determined to uphold federal authority as far as it legally stretched.

Indeed as president, Jefferson proved himself more a.s.sertive and expansionist than he would have believed possible in the 1790s. It was another instance of his contradictions. In the Western Mediterranean, where Barbary pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli preyed on Western s.h.i.+pping, Jefferson abandoned Adams' policy of following the British example, and paying tribute, and instead sent the s.h.i.+ps Adams had built-and which he had opposed-to blockade Tripoli (1803-5) and teach it a lesson. He also sent a land expedition (1804) of American marines and Greek mercenaries across the desert, under the command of William Eaton, the US consul in Tunis-thus producing one theme of the American Marine Corps' marching-song. The Arab beys were the largest-scale slave-merchants (of whites as well as blacks and browns) in the world and hitting them was one way Jefferson could work off his frustrations at not doing anything about American slavery. It certainly aroused the envy of Admiral Nelson, then British naval Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, who was a pa.s.sionate anti-slaver and was longing to have a crack at the beys. It was also the first example of America's willingness to take the initiative in upholding civilized standards of international behavior-an excellent portent for the future.

More astonis.h.i.+ng still is the fact that Jefferson, who saw America's future as that of a medium-sized agrarian republic with no ambitions to great-power status, succeeded in doubling the size of the nation at a stroke. Spain's decision to transfer Louisiana back to France, which was first rumored in Was.h.i.+ngton early in Jefferson's presidency, immediately rang the alarm-bells. Spain's control of New Orleans and the outlet of the Mississippi was a constant irritant. But Spain was weak and could be bullied. France was the strongest military power on earth and might be tempted to recreate the North American empire it had ceded in 1763. 'Nothing since the Revolutionary War has produced such uneasy sensations through the body of the nation,' Jefferson wrote (April 1802); it was 'the embryo of a tornado.' He added, 'There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pa.s.s to market.' His Secretary of State, Madison, agreed. The Mississippi, he wrote, is 'the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the United States, formed into one stream.'

Jefferson instructed Robert Livingston, his envoy in Paris, to open immediate negotiations with the Bonapartist government to see whether there was any possibility of France's allowing the United States to mitigate the peril, or at least insure access to the sea through New Orleans, by some kind of territorial bargain or purchase. He sent James Monroe to Paris to a.s.sist in the deal-if there was one. The French still held Talleyrand's view that America was a rich cow, which could be milked, and it was the first time Was.h.i.+ngton was prepared to wave the Almighty Dollar in the greedy faces of foreigners. But Jefferson was gloomy about the outcome; 'I am not sanguine,' he wrote, in obtaining a cession of New Orleans for money.' Then, in April 1803, the French Foreign Minister, on Bonaparte's terse instructions, offered America the whole of Louisiana, the entire Mississippi valley, New Orleans-the lot-for $15 million, cash down. Jefferson could hardly believe his luck and immediately set about applying to the hated banks, the masters of 'artificial' property, for the money. The deal was concluded in time for the President to announce it on July 4, 1803, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Not only did it double the size of America, making it a country as large as Europe, it also removed the last doubts about western expansion and made it virtually certain that America would double in size again in the next few decades. Never before, or since, in history has such an extraordinary territorial cash-bargain been concluded. The Americans were not sure even how much land they had got, but when Livingston asked the French to indicate the exact boundaries of their cession, Talleyrand sourly replied: 'I can give you no direction. You have made a n.o.ble bargain for yourselves and I suppose you will make the most of it.' He was, of course, right. As it turned out, America got another 828,000 square miles and 1,000 million acres of good land. Jefferson's only doubt was the const.i.tutionality of the purchase. His federal opponents indeed, reversing their usual view, claimed that the Const.i.tution did not authorize the purchase of foreign territory. But Jefferson for once abandoned his const.i.tutional timidity and begged Congress to accept.

Jefferson admitted privately he was breaking the Const.i.tution, justifying himself in a letter to John Breckinridge in a characteristic means-justifies-the-end manner: If the French kept Louisiana America would have to 'marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.' Hence:

I would not give one inch of the Mississippi to any nation, because I see in a light very important to our peace the exclusive right to its navigation ... the Const.i.tution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating foreign nations into our Union. The Executive, in seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advances the good of their country, have done an act beyond the Const.i.tution. The Legislature, in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties, and showing themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and throw themselves on their country in doing for them unauthorised what we know they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.

This is a very important statement in American history, showing that even a strict const.i.tutionalist like Jefferson was prepared to dismiss the Const.i.tution's provisions as 'metaphysical subtleties' if they stood between the United States and what would soon be called its Manifest Destiny to occupy the entire northern half of the hemisphere. After Louisiana, the rest of the United States' enormous acquisitions-or depredations, depending on the viewpoint-would follow almost as a matter of course. At all events Congress approved Jefferson's decision on October 20, 1803 and early the following year a territorial government was set up. Eight years later Louisiana was admitted to the Union, the first of thirteen states to be carved from this immense G.o.dsend.

That the Louisiana affair was not merely a fortuitous aberration in Jefferson's thinking is proved by his decision, even before the purchase was arranged, to ask Congress secretly to authorize and finance an expedition to explore overland routes to the American Pacific coast. He had nurtured this idea since boyhood and ten years before, as secretary of state, he had tried to persuade the French naturalist Andrew Michaux to explore 'a river called Oregon' and find 'the shortest and most convenient route of communication between the US & the Pacific Ocean.' He now commanded his secretary, Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809), to lead an exploratory team to sort out and map the concourse of huge rivers flowing westward on the other side of the watershed from the Mississippi-Missouri headwaters.

Lewis picked his army colleague William Clark (1770-11838) to join him, and they a.s.sembled and trained a party of thirty-four soldiers and ten civilians outside St Louis in the winter of 1803, before setting off on a three-year journey. Thanks to a remarkable Shoshone Indian woman, Sacajawea (1786-1812), who acted as guide and interpreter, they crossed the continental divide safely, found the Columbia River and, on November 8, 1805, gazed on the broad Pacific. Lewis went back by the same route (with detours), Clark through the Yellowstone, and they met again at Fort Union, the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri. They then went down the Missouri, arriving back at St Louis on September 23, 1806. Both reported back in triumph to the President: 'In obedience to your orders we have penetrated the Continent of north America to the Pacific Ocean, and sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm with confidence that we have discovered the most practicable route which does exist across the Continent by means of the navigable branches of the Missouri and Columbia rivers. It was one of the most successful and comprehensive geographical adventures ever undertaken, which brought back a ma.s.s of economic, political, military, scientific, and cartographical information recorded in copious journals and maps. Jefferson was delighted, as well he might be: the story of the West had begun. Five years later, John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), a German-born adventurer who had entered America in 1784, became a fur-trader, and formed the American Fur Company (1808) and the Pacific Fur Company (1810), founded the first trading post, Astoria, on the Pacific itself (1811) in the Columbia estuary. Within a few months it had been reported in the leading St Louis newspapers that 'it appears that a journey across the Continent of N. America might be performed with a wagon, there being no obstruction in the whole route that any person would dare call a mountain. Thus the concept and the route of the Oregon Trail came into existence.

Since during his presidency Jefferson had in effect created the Deep South and laid the foundations of the West, it is disappointing to relate that his period in office ended in failure and gloom. But so it was, because neither he nor Madison knew how to steer the United States through the troubled waters of the Napoleonic Wars. The truth is, they were emotionally involved, a fatal propensity in geopolitics. In 1803 the renewal of the great war between republican France and the royalist coalition led by Britain made it possible for the United States to get Louisiana cheap but in other respects it was a disaster for a commercial and maritime power such as America had now become. Britain's victory at Trafalgar in November 18o5, in which the Franco-Spanish battlefleet was destroyed, made it supreme at sea. Bonaparte's victories against Austria and Russia at Friedland (1807) put the whole of Continental Europe at his mercy. In order to destroy British exports, gold from which financed the resistance to his tyranny, he imposed what was known as the Continental System, a punitive embargo on British goods. The British responded with their Orders in Council which allowed British blockading fleets to impound even neutral s.h.i.+ps, caught violating an elaborate set of rules designed to hit France and its allies commercially. Jefferson in turn pa.s.sed the Non-Importation Act (April 1806), which banned most British goods and embargoed all non-American s.h.i.+pping.

It is important to realize that all three parties were divided on these measures. The mechanics and economics of international trade were little understood. Policies, shaped in ignorance, often produced the opposite effect of that intended. Bonaparte's Continental System led to trouble with most of his allies and satellites and did his cause more harm than Britain's. The Orders in Council, ill understood and difficult to enforce, harmed Britain's trade most. The Non-Importation Act failed completely, though it certainly angered Britain. The commercial clauses of Jay's treaty expired in 1807 and Monroe, now envoy in London, failed to get sufficient backing from Jefferson and Madison to reach a settlement. The result was a series of incidents between British wars.h.i.+ps and United States vessels culminating in a naval battle off Norfolk in which the British frigate Leopard, searching for deserters serving on US s.h.i.+ps, forced the American frigate Chesapeake to strike its colors, seized four men aboard, and hanged one of them. The fury caused by this incident, visible from America's sh.o.r.e, was such that if Congress had been sitting war must have followed. Jefferson himself was confused. His intellect told him that Britain and America, being both major maritime and trading powers, had a mutual interest in enforcing the freedom of the seas and the free exchange of traffic and goods at all ports-something the Continental System challenged. The two powers should have worked out a sensible joint policy and renewed Jay's treaty on its basis. But all Jefferson's republican emotions tugged him in the direction of France, and his hatred of monarchy blinded him to the fact that Bonaparte's military dictators.h.i.+p-adumbrating the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century-was an infinitely greater threat to individual liberties than Britain's const.i.tutional and parliamentary crown.

Jefferson managed to keep America out of war for the time being, but in order to respond to the war-fever in some way he got Congress, in December 1807, to pa.s.s the Embargo Act, virtually without discussion, which effectively ended all American overseas commerce by forbidding US s.h.i.+ps to leave for foreign ports. How Congress failed to throw out this absurdity is a mystery. While American s.h.i.+ps remained in harbor, their crews idle and unpaid, smuggling flourished and British s.h.i.+ps had a monopoly of legitimate trade. By a cunning piece of legal legerdemain Bonaparte impounded $10 million of American goods on the ground that he was a.s.sisting Jefferson's embargo. It was the most serious political mistake of Jefferson's entire career because it led the Northern s.h.i.+pping and manufacturing interests to a.s.sert, with some plausibility, that the government was being run in the interests of the 'Virginia Dynasty' and its slave-owning planters by a pack of pro-French ultra-republican ideologues. The government was forced to capitulate, backtracking by getting Congress to pa.s.s the Non-Intercourse Acts (1809), which got some commerce going again but left everyone's feelings, at home and abroad, raw and inflamed.

The damage to Jefferson's reputation caused by the miseries of the embargo, and the often cruel and disreputable attempts to enforce it, is reflected in the angry letters which poured into his office and which he read with mounting distress. 'Take off the Embargo, return to Carters Mountain and be ashamed of yourself and never show your head in Publick Company again.' 'I am Sir a Friend to Commerce and No Friend to your Administration.' 'Mr President if you know what is good for your future welfare you will take off the embargo.' 'Look at the Situation in the Country when you Took the Chair and look at it now. I should think it would make you sink with despair and hide yourself in the Mountains.' 'You are bartering away this Countrys rights honor and Liberty to that infamous tirant of the world (Napolien).' 'I have agreed to pay four of my friends $400 to shoat you if you dont take off the embargo.' 'Here I am in Boston in a starving condition ... you are one of the greatest tirants in the whole world.' Jefferson endorsed some of these letters 'abusive' or 'written from tavern scenes of drunkenness.' But others were detailed and circ.u.mstantial accounts of the distress caused, such as one written on behalf of 4,000 penniless seamen in Philadelphia-'Sir we Humbly beg your Honur to Grant us destras Seamen Sum relaf for G.o.d nos what we will do.' Some were from dest.i.tute seamen's wives claiming that their children were without bread. There were over 300 pet.i.tions signed by many hands, multiple threats-one from '300 yankee youths between 18 & 29'-'If I dont cut my throat I will join the English and fight against you. I hope, honored sir, you will forgive the abrupt manner in which this is wrote as I'm d.a.m.n'd mad.' One of many desperate letters says the writer has been forced to steal food to feed his children and intends to 'take to highway robbing.

Jefferson, who had been an optimist up to the turn of the century, was now gloomy, shaken, and demoralized. During his final months in office, government policy disintegrated, with desperate legislative expedients pa.s.sing backwards and forwards between the two Houses of Congress, and between Congress and executive, in confused attempts to get off the hook of the embargo. Finally, under the pretense of standing up to both France and Britain, Congress pa.s.sed the Non-Intercourse Act (1809), which effectively repealed the embargo. Jefferson wearily signed it into law on March z, writing to his friend Pont de Nemours: 'Within a few days I retire to my family, my books and my farms [at Monticello] ... Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. The truth is, he had virtually ceased to be in charge of affairs during the last few months of his presidency, and he left office a beaten man.

But worse was to come. Madison had been preparing for the pres dencv all his life. First-born son of the wealthiest planter in Orange County, he came from the summit of the civilized Virginia gentry. He had been elaborately educated, especially under the great Witherspoon at Princeton. He had studied history, political theory, and economics all his life, as well as the cla.s.sics. He had known Jefferson since 1776 and the two men's intimate correspondence is a political and literary education in itself. Small, industrious, moderate, soft-spoken, seeing all sides of the question, trying always to conciliate and reach the golden mean, he was 'a model of neo-cla.s.sical self-command,' seeking a dream, as the poet Robert Frost has said, 'of a new land to fulfill with people in self-control.' He had served in the House of Burgesses and in Congress, helped draft the Virginia const.i.tution and its Statute of Religious Freedom, a.s.sisted at the Mount Vernon Conference, the Annapolis Convention, and the Const.i.tutional Convention, where, more than any other man there, he was the author of the US Const.i.tution itself. He had written twenty-six of the Federalist Papers and was the princ.i.p.al architect of the Bill of Rights. He had been a notable leader of the Jeffersonians in Congress and had served his master as secretary of state. He even, unlike Jefferson, had a sense of humor. When, as secretary of state, he had to entertain the Tunisian envoy, come to Was.h.i.+ngton to negotiate on behalf of the Barbary pirates, and granted the Arab's request for concubines for his elevenstrong party, he put down the cost as 'appropriations for foreign intercourse' (Jefferson was not amused). His wife, Dorothea or Dolley (1768-1849), was a beautiful girl from North Carolina who made herself the first great Was.h.i.+ngton hostess. But Madison proved a cla.s.sic ill.u.s.tration of Tacitus' maxim omnium consensu capax imperii nisi impera.s.set. He was no good.

It was a measure of Madison's executive awkwardness that, in his inaugural address, he set out his aims in a sentence he seemed unable to end and which eventually consisted of 470 words and proved difficult to read. At the reception afterwards in the F Street residence, Dolley was in ravis.h.i.+ng beauty-'drest in a plain cambric-dress with a very long train, plain round the neck without any handkerchief, and beautiful bonnet of purple velvet, and white satin with white plumes-all dignity, grace and affability.' Dolley, who was 'very much in Charge of the little Man' (Madison seemed tiny, though he had a large head), finished decorating the new Executive Mansion, spending $2,205 for knives, forks, 'bottle stands and andirons,' $458 for a pianoforte and $28 for 'a guitar.' She soon launched the White House's first 'drawingroom' receptions which, in her day, were celebrated-the men in 'black or blue coat with vest, black breeches and black stockings,' the ladies 'not remarkable for anything so much as for the exposure of their swelling b.r.e.a.s.t.s and bare backs." But, behind the glitter, there was endless confusion about how America should extricate itself from a maritime clash over rights which few people on either side of the Atlantic now understood. Madison wasted precious months, even years, in foolish expectation that the war would end or, more likely, that the parliamentary struggles in Britain would throw up a new ministry which would see things from America's viewpoint and sc.r.a.p the measures against neutral s.h.i.+ps.

Actually, it was not so much the divisions in British politics which made a compromise so difficult as the pressures and increasing sectionalism in America. It might be true, as Was.h.i.+ngton had said in his Farewell Address, that East, West, North, and South in America had much more in common than points of difference. But, in the short-tempered atmosphere aroused by the long European war and its Atlantic repercussions, the differences seemed insuperable. New England had virtually everything in common with British maritime interests. But the further south and west you traveled the more opinion-leaders you found who wanted a showdown with Britain as the road to expansion. Was not Canada to be had for the taking? And Florida? And the West Indies? And this was Madison's const.i.tuency. These states had elected him in 1808, and when he was reelected in 1812 his dependence on the South and West was even more marked. His opponent, Clinton, carried New York (twenty-nine electoral college votes), Ma.s.sachusetts (twenty-two votes), Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and other smaller states, making a total of eighty-nine votes. Madison had Virginia (twenty-five), Pennsylvania (twenty-five), and a group of Southern and Western states, led by the Carolinas, Georgia, and Kentucky, making 128 votes. But the seven states which voted for Madison had a total of 980,000 slaves. These blacks had no voice in government whatever but each group of 45,000 added an electoral vote to the state where they were held, giving the cause of the South-and war-a total of twenty-one electoral votes. Thus the New England federalists