James and Dolley Madison (28 page)

All of America breathed a sigh of relief at the end of April when Britain's foreign minister announced that he had reached an amicable agreement with the United States to end the practice of the impressment of seamen on the Atlantic and the policy of stopping American merchant ships. There would be no war. Madison had won. The news was so momentous that the
National Intelligencer
even put out its very first special edition to announce the details of the agreement. The special edition even carried the official letter from British minister D. M. Erskine that outlined the policy. “I have the honor to inform you that I have received His Majesty's commands to represent [England] to the government of the United States that His Majesty is animated by the most sincere desire for an adjustment of the differences which have unhappily so long prevailed between the two countries.”
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In its next edition, the editor of the
National Intelligencer
praised the British for ending their practices. “The British orders have been rescinded so far as they respect the United States. On these happy results, together with the consequent renewal of amicable intercourse between the two nations, we most sincerely congratulate our fellow citizens.”
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At Monticello, Jefferson, who had battled the British prior to his retirement, was happy. Jefferson believed that the English had changed their minds because of reversals in their policy in Spain. He also told Madison that he was right for sticking with the embargo and perhaps the British change of heart was, in a great part, due to that policy. “I sincerely congratulate you on the change it has produced in our situation. It is a source of very general joy here.”
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Little did he know what lay ahead.

As soon as British leaders back in London learned what the headstrong, impulsive Erskine had done, they announced that he had overstepped his boundaries. Nothing he said or wrote meant anything, they said in tough language. British sea policy was firm and would not be changed. It was like an iron door that slammed between America and Britain.

Madison was livid. He said that England's behavior was “fraud and folly” and told friends that he had been double-crossed by George Canning, Britain's secretary of foreign affairs. Jefferson was aghast. “Canning's equivocations degrade his government as well as himself. I despair of accommodations with them because I believe they are weak enough to intend seriously to claim the ocean as their conquest and to think to amuse with embassies and negotiations until the claim shall have been strengthened.”
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Attorney General Caesar Rodney was angry over the reversal of policy.
“The very unexpected and inauspicious turn given to our relations with G.B. by the disavowal of the friendly arrangement concluded by her accredited minister [does] not fail to excite a lively sensibility among a people conscious of their own just purposes,” he told Madison.
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All of America's diplomatic efforts had failed. Politics had failed. History had failed. America was right back where it started, and Britain would continue to bully her. A corner had been turned, though. Now Madison and all Americans saw the British as duplicitous. They were not only never going to change their policy but also would slap down anyone, even their own minister, who even suggested that they might.

A summer darkness fell over James Madison's White House.

Madison ruled over a country filled with extensive change, a nation in which something new seemed to be happening all the time, a society in high-speed transition. These changes, combined with the actions of the president and the people in his administration, contributed mightily to the “new” America that was rapidly developing.

It was a country whose life was distinctly different from that in nations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. The United States had changed much since the first days of the revolution in 1775, but now, in the early 1800s, change was lightning fast. Everything seemed to be in flux, yet Americans adapted easily to all of it, no matter how crazy it became.

Madison was responsible for most of it or harnessed it and let it help him shape his government. The period of 1800 to 1836, which began with Madison's appointment as secretary of state and ended with his death, saw monumental differences in the United States.

James and Dolley Madison were well aware of the social revolution taking place when they arrived in Washington. The pair had adapted to dozens of changes in their own lives and had found that they were able to turn as the lives of the people turned. They were not stuck in the past, unable to look at their new country with new eyes, like so many of their friends in the colonial era, but instead they were constantly on the move. Madison had gone to college when the nation was part of the British Empire; served in Congress during one of the world's bloodiest revolutions; wrote a new Constitution for America; lobbied to have it ratified; served two terms in the new United States Congress; helped George Washington construct America's first government; and was now, in 1801, the secretary of state in a party that no one ever heard of a decade earlier. In his personal life, he had spent forty-three years as a bachelor and then suddenly turned around and married. More than that, he had married a much
younger, dazzling woman. His new wife introduced him to new friends and a brand-new life.

Dolley Madison had been born in a log cabin and now lived in a palatial mansion on one of the largest plantations in America. She had married happily as a young woman, lost her husband, and then married again. She had been accepted into and then booted out of the Quakers. In a few years, she had gone from a young woman who had just a handful of dresses to the fashion queen of America. Dolley had transitioned quite easily from an unknown girl in Philadelphia with few friends into the most famous woman in the world. Change? The Madisons knew all about it.

It was everywhere. The national change was no better represented, perhaps, than in the transportation revolution. In the early 1800s, the local Washington newspapers were full of advertisements looking for workers and heralding the success of the construction of the new Potomack Canal, one of the first lengthy canal waterways in America.
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The canal, which went around the Great Potomac Falls several miles west of Washington, was the brainchild of President Washington. He had first sailed up the Potomac in 1754 when he was an officer in the Virginia militia, attached to the British army in the French and Indian War. His original purpose was to see what the possibilities were for the movement of British military troops up the river by boat into the Ohio territory. He immediately saw a controlled waterway, a canal. “I doubt but you will readily concur with me in judging it more convenient, least expensive and I may further say by much the most expeditious way to the country,” he wrote James Innes in the summer of 1754. Later, in 1783, he went further, writing French diplomat Chevalier de Castellux that “I shall not rest contented until I have explored the west country [via canals].” He added that canals would give America “a new empire.”
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Washington did not discover canals. The controlled rivers had been used by Montauk Indians on Long Island since the early 1600s. Massachusetts pilgrim leader Myles Standish proposed building a canal through the isthmus that connected the Massachusetts mainland to the lengthy Cape Cod peninsula in 1623. In 1690, William Penn talked of building several canals to connect Philadelphia to different Pennsylvania rivers. In 1724, Cadwallader Colden, a surveyor in New York, outlined a canal project from the Great Lakes to the Hudson River. In Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin proposed a canal between several rivers and the city of Philadelphia.
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John Ballendine started a company to build a Maryland canal. Ballendine and several associates traveled to England to study some of the successful canals there and decided it could be done in Maryland. In 1774, Ballendine said that he would begin excavating the areas around the Great Falls. The Potomack Canal
idea grew in fits and starts from that announcement, but the revolution held up progress. It was in 1784 that Washington pulled his friend James Madison into it.

He saw Madison as his chief catalyst to get something done by the Continental Congress. Washington sent Madison copies of letters from Virginia officials supporting the canal, petitions from people in both Virginia and Maryland, and a copy of a bill to legalize the Potomack Canal Company. Madison liked the idea and, along with several congressmen, ushered the bill through Congress. Washington, ever the politician, told Madison that both the Virginia and the Maryland legislatures had to approve the idea. “Would it not be highly expedient, therefore, as the session of both assemblies must soon draw to a close, for each to depute one or more members to meet at some intermediate place, and agree upon an adequate bill to be adopted by both states?” he asked, adding that both states could make strong claims as to why their rivers were more important. Madison agreed. Both legislatures met and approved the canal.
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George Washington told Madison, and others, that in the end, the canal would be worth it to all. “We should do our part towards opening the communication with the fur and peltry trade of the Lakes and for the produce of the country which lies within and which will…be settled faster than any one ever did, or any one would imagine,” he said, and he added that colonists in the western areas might align themselves with the French or the British there rather than the [English] colonists on the seaboard if there was no transportation connection.
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By 1791, work had started on the locks used to lift and lower boats on the Potomack Canal. Construction continued through 1801, when Madison arrived in Washington to serve as secretary of state. At the end of 1801, the Great Falls canal locks were completed and boats began to sail through.
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Madison became hooked on the idea of canals. In 1786, he met with Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush to begin the building of a canal from the Philadelphia area to the Chesapeake Bay. Their idea later became the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, opened nearly thirty years later. As secretary of state and later president, Madison watched over the Potomack Canal and others (the Potomack project never grew beyond its original small stretch).

Madison convinced Jefferson of the importance of canals in expanding America and increasing business. In his second inaugural address, Jefferson called for Americans to turn their eyes “to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals.” He told the country that canals would help to unify regions, too. “New channels of communication will be opened between the states…the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties.”
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Jefferson and Madison were both aware, too, that population patterns in America were changing. Now, as the nineteenth century started, there were nearly one million American settlers in the Mississippi region and more were arriving by foot, on horseback, and in the large Conestoga wagons every day.
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Stirred by Jefferson's message and Madison's interest, Congress asked Albert Gallatin to design a system of new canals and roadways across the country. He and his aides spent months on the project. Their final system included dozens of intrastate and interstate canals, as well as lengthy new highways. The plan never went into effect, though.

In 1801, when he moved to the capital, Madison, like Washington, saw canals as a way to create easy transportation that would help coal-mining regions in western Virginia and Pennsylvania prosper. It would spur on the slowly growing manufacturing industry and permit southern states like Virginia to pursue new industries and leave farming, and slavery, behind. Madison realized that the South, with a large manufacturing component and its seaports would challenge the northern states for economic supremacy and enable southern manufacturers and farmers to become larger trading partners with Europe.

Madison's support of canals to help manufacturing showed his ever-evolving thinking processes and the way that he changed as circumstances did. In the late 1780s and early 1790s, Madison had been a champion of farming. In a speech to Congress in 1789, he called agriculture “the staple of the United States” and admired the “manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.” In an article he wrote for the
National Gazette
in 1792 he said of farmers “the great proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent and the more happy must be the society itself.” His friends, such as Jefferson, considered Madison, who was a neophyte to the fields, as a remarkably good farmer. “[He] is the best farmer in the world,” said Jefferson of his friend in the 1790s. Now, changing with the times, Madison saw the promise of industry and transportation as well as farming through canals.
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The canal revolution receded with the advent of the railroad, which grew in gargantuan proportions from 1830 to 1880. The railroad could deliver goods cheaper and more swiftly. By the time the canal era, sponsored so enthusiastically by Madison, ended, the nation had thirty-three major canals, ranging from the vast Erie in the North to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in the South, plus small waterways such as the Chemung Canal and Chenango Canal.
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It was not the canal that Madison saw as the great change in America, though. It was the highway.

Madison, like everybody else in the United States, was tired of traveling on narrow dirt highways, some just eight or nine feet wide. They flooded in rainstorms and became vast dustbowls in the hot summer months. The ruts in some were so deep that horse-pulled carriages were overturned when their wheels rolled into them. Everyone who traveled to Mount Vernon to see George Washington was delighted to see him and his wife but complained bitterly that to get to his country estate they had to ride down one of the worst dirt roads in the nation.

One incident in 1808 illustrates Madison's fury at the conditions of his beloved highways. He and his wife were returning to Montpelier from Washington following a fierce rainstorm. Roads were flooded. Madison wrote Jefferson that he nearly didn't make it home. “I got home Friday night by taking my carriage to pieces and making three trips…over Porter's mill pond, in something like a boat, swimming my horses,” he wrote in anger.
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Dolley dreaded traveling. Once, prior to a trip from Washington to Montpelier, she wrote that “my limbs yet tremble with the terrors and fatigue our journey.” One of her friends wrote her in 1811 that his carriage hit a bump in the road and overturned. He was thrown from the carriage, another man fell out of the side door, the driver fell to the road, the rigging separated from the car, and the horses bolted off with it. The men found two of the horses and rode home on them.
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Everyone complained of being victims to the roads and weather. “We had a dreadful journey home. I was thankful that my bones were not broke,” complained Dolley Cole Beckwith in 1804.
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James Madison told the story of Governor William Cabell, who left his home to ride to the University of Virginia in 1826 and did so “traveling the whole way with this snow & hail in his face.”
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