Madison and Jefferson (97 page)

Jefferson’s clearest reflection during these years on the problems associated
with slavery and emancipation appears in two exchanges: one with the businessman John Lynch, founder of Lynchburg, in 1811; and another, the more famous, with Edward Coles, in 1814.

Late in 1810, a Philadelphia Quaker had been in the area of Jefferson’s Poplar Forest retreat and had hoped to find Jefferson on his property. Failing this, she conveyed her ideas to Lynch, “with a request that I would Lay the matter before thee.” Anne Mifflin, like Lynch, wished that Virginians would coordinate with existing British efforts to colonize African Americans on the West Coast of Africa. During Jefferson’s presidency, she had written to a member of Congress, asking that the plan be presented to Jefferson and had heard nothing since.

Replying to Lynch, Jefferson explained what he had sought to do as president. His views concerning “the people of color of these states” had never really changed, he said. He had long favored “gradually drawing off this part of our population” and “transplanting them among the inhabitants of Africa.” In 1801 Virginia’s legislature, through the office of then-Governor Monroe, had requested presidential action, and Jefferson in turn recommended following the plan of the private English company that was colonizing former American slaves in Sierra Leone; or if that was logistically infeasible, to look to “some of the Portuguese possessions in South America.” Monroe raised the possibility of colonization closer to home—west of the Mississippi—which Jefferson rejected outright. He wrote to the U.S. minister in London, who informed him that the Sierra Leone enterprise was opposed to including any more African Americans in their colony, owing to their reputation for disruptiveness. The colony was by then in financial straits, what Jefferson called “a languishing condition.” His effort, as president, to interest the Portuguese “proved also abortive.” He was now a private individual, unable to perform officially, though he believed that the commercial prospects were equal to the humanitarian value in setting up an African colony. “But for this the national mind is not yet prepared,” he concluded. He spoke in favor of “the experiment,” but urged prudence and caution.
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The more famous exchange of this period was Jefferson’s with his wealthy young neighbor Edward Coles. Born in Albemarle when Jefferson was serving as the U.S. minister to France, Coles grew up identifying with the first families of Virginia and, like Jefferson, attended the College of William and Mary. This privileged young Virginian, as secretary to President Madison, felt comfortable sending Jefferson a pressing appeal to help him bring an end to slavery in their home state. Coles planned to emancipate
his slaves, bring them to Illinois, and give them land—it would be 160 acres each when he succeeded in realizing his plan a decade later.

Telling Jefferson in his letter of July 31, 1814, that he had had such an enterprise in mind ever since he was old enough to grasp the meaning of the “rights of man,” Coles admitted he was uncertain as to the reception of his ideas. But he could not contain himself in seeking aid from his famous neighbor. “The fear of appearing presumptuous” would have deterred him, he wrote, “had I not the highest opinion of your goodness & liberality … My object is to entreat & beseech you to exert your knowledge & influence.” Do not refuse out of a fear of failure, he ventured.
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Jefferson understood the passion that went into Coles’s composition and wrote feelingly in reply three weeks later: “The love of justice & the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.” He owned that his passages on slavery in
Notes on Virginia
remained the best synthesis of his beliefs, as he recounted for Coles his own early activism: as a colonial legislator he had appealed to a senior statesman, Colonel Richard Bland, to seek “certain moderate extensions of the protection of the laws to these people.” Bland followed through, embracing Jefferson’s idea in a public forum, only to be “denounced as an enemy of his country, & treated with the grossest indecorum.” Whether or not Jefferson was suggesting a direct parallel, he was insisting that his time to make waves was past. His preferred analogy was to Virgil, the epic poet of Rome, whose
Aeneid
related the fall of Troy. Were he to enter the lists with Coles, Jefferson would be King Priam, long past his fighting days when he ridiculously strapped on a set of useless armor and attempted to save the city. The ex-president claimed he was too old to accomplish anything significant. “This enterprise is for the young,” he told Coles, adding: “It shall have all my prayers.”

Coles allowed three weeks to pass before he addressed Jefferson once again. He refused to let him off the hook. “Your prayers I trust will not only be heard with indulgences in Heaven,” he said, “but with influence on earth. But I cannot agree with you that they are the only weapons of one of your age, nor that the difficult work of cleansing the escutchion [
sic
] of Virginia of the foul stain of slavery can be best done by the young.” The old must combine with the young, he coached, because the old had achieved a high social station and still held the power to change course—providing that the will remained healthy. Joining together, old and young could combat the unfortunate human tendencies of “apathy,” “habit,” and “inertia.”

Coles explained again his reasons for turning to Jefferson, whom he
termed “the first of our aged worthies.” He did not invoke Madison in these letters, but Coles must have presumed—or been told directly—that the war president was in no position to tackle so contentious an issue at this moment. He seemed undeterred, though, by Jefferson’s alert rationalizations, and with an utter lack of inhibition, he reminded the ex-president that Benjamin Franklin, at a greatly advanced age, had spoken out against slavery and had the degree of influence over Pennsylvanians that Coles hoped Jefferson might have over their fellow Virginians.
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Jefferson was not inclined in the least to accommodate Coles. In the letters of his retirement years, he wrote so often of his “love of tranquility” that the phrase became automatic. During the presidencies of Madison and Monroe, he commented at will on national and international affairs, expecting his successors as president to treat all such letters as confidential. To others, he routinely protested his desire to spend his final years away from the public eye, as a farmer, a gardener, and a family man. When the subject was slavery and race, he would listen to those whose fertile thoughts of dramatic possibilities would one day improve America. It was an extension of his theory of generational distinctiveness: the successors would shape a different destiny for themselves, based on the will of a new majority unencumbered by the yoke of the past.

As 1814 opened, news arrived that Napoleon had suffered more serious reverses and was retreating into France. His abdication in early April improved British military prospects in America. Men and ships previously committed to Europe would now be able to come to the aid of Canada. Russian mediation had collapsed late in December, but the British still expressed a readiness to restart negotiations in Sweden. That was where the American negotiating team went—a group that had grown to include J. Q. Adams, Albert Gallatin, and James Bayard, with the new addition (so as not to appear too conciliatory) of Speaker of the House Henry Clay.

Federalists assumed that the recent course of events would prompt Madison to press for peace on just about any terms. But that was wishful thinking on their part. For one, American sailors, as a rule, were happy with their commanders and nationalistic in spirit. Privateers were having a tremendous impact on the war: the more than five hundred authorized privateering vessels had captured more than thirteen hundred British prizes
and earned considerable financial rewards in so doing. In the view of the enemy, these motley crews did greater damage than the U.S. Navy.
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The United States was now fielding disciplined forces. They were led by men in their twenties and thirties: Winfield Scott, Jacob Brown, and Edmund Pendleton Gaines (named after, but not directly related to, the Revolutionary), all of whom came under heavy onslaughts from the north but whose decisions and determination had secured the strategic Niagara region. The British had some success as they pressed south from Montreal, until routed at the Battle of Plattsburgh at the end of summer. This was more than tit for tat, as the casualty rate along the Canadian frontier was severe on both sides.
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The state of affairs to the north was eclipsed in August 1814 by the more than symbolic British assault on the Chesapeake and the wanton destruction of Washington, D.C. The man at the helm for the British was forty-two-year-old Rear Admiral George Cockburn, who had seen considerable action against Napoleon before coming to America. Though some under his command felt a kinship with their American cousins, Cockburn was well known for his near-obsessive need to punish the upstarts for their challenge to British preeminence. Secretary Armstrong, to his discredit, believed the federal city safe and focused on the defense of Baltimore. Madison himself appears to have been watching and waiting more than he might have. From Montpelier in May, he apologized to Jefferson that he would be unable to visit Monticello anytime soon. “I am obliged,” he wrote, “to hold myself in readiness,” in the event that he was called to Washington on short notice. Absent from their correspondence was any concern with brutality or loss of life on the battlefield. In their letters, war had become not an abstraction, but a predominantly political issue. Madison relished relating the defeat of antiwar Federalists at the polls in New York. He did not feel hamstrung by factions in Congress and the states, believing more than ever that he could direct the course of political measures and make political appointments.
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He took his life in his hands simply by returning to Washington as the hot, sticky, “bilious” months began, when acute gastrointestinal ailments ravaged the area. The president was sixty-three, far from robust, and accustomed to spending his summers, as Jefferson had, in the healthier setting of Piedmont Virginia. But having returned at this unseasonable time, Madison got straight to business. He called together the members of his cabinet, who were still focused on prosecuting the war for Canada.

Over the course of June and July, Armstrong continued to plod along,
while Madison and Monroe, wary of that gentleman’s motives, increasingly feared that Washington itself was the prize Cockburn sought. Madison began to inspect War Department records more closely, trying to read into the secretary’s routine, and realized that Armstrong had communicated with his generals on subjects of critical importance without showing that correspondence to the president.

All intelligence suggested that the enemy was strengthening. The capital was “in a state of perturbation,” Dolley Madison wrote to Hannah Gallatin in late July, openly wishing she were back in Philadelphia. As Cockburn’s warships hovered nearby, the first lady stated that her husband had resolved to stay at his post in the event of an invasion and go down with the ship of state. From Boston, Vice President Gerry wrote the president that he approved strong war measures to match “mad” Britain’s “vindictive feelings …, pride & vain glory.” Meanwhile, news arrived that fifteen thousand more British troops had landed in Montreal.
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A test was coming. The British invasion force landed on August 17, southeast of Washington along the Maryland shore. Armstrong was uncertain whether Baltimore or Washington was the immediate target. Secretary of State Monroe, a Revolutionary cavalry colonel, mounted his horse and reconnoitered personally. On the twenty-fourth the British broke camp and descended on Bladensburg, Maryland, just above the state’s border with the District of Columbia. Monroe joined the commander of the Baltimore militia and tried to direct the defense. But there was no time to rally the troops or even maintain order, as the British launched rockets and the American militia took to their heels. Cockburn himself rode a white steed and took charge of artillery at considerable personal peril. One bullet just missed him; another killed a marine standing beside him. While they lost more men than the Americans, who held the high position, the British routed the inexperienced militiamen. The road to the President’s House lay open to them.
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Incredibly, there was no one left to defend Washington. When he returned to the executive mansion late that afternoon, the president learned that Dolley had fled with the army. She and their servant Paul Jennings had saved one canvas from the expected onslaught, refusing to leave George Washington’s portrait for the invaders. A week earlier a State Department clerk had taken care to remove the original of the federal Constitution for safekeeping. The president had nothing to gain by waiting around.

It was not yet dark when Royal Marines reached the Capitol. A pyrotechnics expert was on hand to oversee its destruction. The Library of
Congress, housed in the Capitol, went up in flames, and the whole could be seen for many miles into the night. According to Major General Robert Ross, who accompanied Cockburn up Pennsylvania Avenue, Madison was expecting a fine dinner and plenty of friendly company. Instead, the president’s table, laid out for forty, was the scene of a rollicking celebration by British raiders, who enjoyed Madison’s wine almost as much as they enjoyed the irony of it all. While Washington’s citizens were physically unharmed, the president’s domicile was consumed by flames, along with the other public buildings.
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The
Baltimore Patriot
had its story ready the very next day but could only speculate as to the full damage. “The Navy Yard, report says, is burnt,” it read. “Whether the Capitol is destroyed is not known, though it is believed to be.” When the smoke cleared and the whole series of events became known, a militiaman’s letter expressed a loss of composure as yet unrecovered: “I do not pretend to censure any one in particular; but a dread responsibility rests somewhere. I almost blush to put on the American uniform.” As was customary in times of war, the fate of women and children framed the emotion of the memoirist: “I cannot describe the distress of the female part of our inhabitants, many of whom flew into the country without a hiding place or a protector.”