11 A Defect of Adequate Statesmen

MADISON SCOURED THE NEWSPAPERS IN THE TAVERNS. HE SLICED OPEN the envelopes arriving daily from home. He eyed the exhausted soldiers returning from the front with musket wounds, amputations, and frostbite. Their plight galled him. The states’ coffers simply did not hold enough currency to pay for the boots, blankets, flour, bacon, and rum that would get soldiers through battle. He fretted that General Washington was “weak in numbers beyond all suspicion” and facing as great a threat “from famine as from the Enemy.” Unless reinforcements were sent, he said, the campaign would become “equally disgraceful to our Councils & disgus[t]ful to our Allies.”¹

As a delegate in Virginia, he had been fascinated by the issue too demonically complicated for many other delegates: supplying the troops. Madison loved wrangling with the issue of military supplies because it united, so concisely, all his preoccupations—the nation’s money supply, his failure to serve as a soldier, and the home front. Even better, for a mind drawn to nettlesome paradoxes, the issue presented an almost perfect quandary. The Scylla and Charybdis were these: The states could print more dollars to pay merchants for the goods, but that would quickly deflate their currency. Or they could “requisition” (the polite term for “seize”) wealthy citizens’ private assets to supply the troops, but that would further cripple confidence in the government. And the federal government, of course, was too toothless to solve the problem on its own. In early 1780, Congress faced the astounding option of requesting that the states contribute to the federal treasury not in currency but in kind: with flour, beef, hay, and corn. It was as if the nation was returning to an ancient time where tribes exchanged goods for peace.²

If he was an impatient young man ready to unleash change on an immature nation before he arrived in Philadelphia, Madison’s frustration only redoubled when two of Washington’s regiments threatened to mutiny because their nation would not pay, feed, or clothe them.3

Two days after he first started his service in Congress, he was appointed to the three-member Board of Admiralty. This was a difficult assignment, for the navy was tiny and barely functioning and full of complaints to Congress.⁴ Madison eventually resigned the assignment in early June, but not before drawing notice for the quality and precision of his commentary.

Barely half a year into his Philadelphia stint, the frenetic figure, silent on the floor of the legislature, was already eliciting remarkable respect. Madison pulled focus. Everyone listened when he spoke, watching him for cues, as he offered the piercing intelligence, leavened with wry humor, that had been his métier since college. By the summer, leaders in Congress suggested him for an appointment to a foreign embassy, most likely Spain or France, an extraordinary recognition for a first-term congressman. But he quickly declined. We do not know why, but he later expressed mortal fears that European travel would endanger his health. Through his long life, he would never visit the Continent, and anxiety again seems to be a likely culprit.

The Madisons of Virginia eagerly consumed news of his advances in Philadelphia. His cousin wrote him from Williamsburg, “We hear that you have refused an important Place in a foreign Embassy.” Plainly devastated, the reverend desperately tried to reframe Madison’s choice as courage. The “Refusal does you Honour,” he said, but could not refrain from delectating upon the lost honors Madison would have gathered. His cousin confessed that he himself could not have “withstood so alluring a Prospect.” But he conceded that Madison’s noble nature insulated him from self-gratification; “ambitious motives,” he said, did not “have any Influence with you.”⁵

Madison was the avatar of his family’s dreams. In assuaging his own anxiety, he also increased theirs. On that front, victory must have seemed impossible.

BY OCTOBER 1780, THE RAGGED TROOPS WERE EYEING YET ANOTHER brutal winter. Madison predicted the supply trains would bring not relief but “infinite disappointment.” He told his friends the states needed to own up to the unpleasant duty of taxing their citizens in real currency to fund their military operations. If the states refused taxation and relied on printing money, he said, “what was intended for our relief will only hasten our destruction.”6

He responded to this dysfunctional situation with imagination. Brainstorming is the apt metaphor; he loved to let ideas rain, to splash with new concepts, or to let them splash with him. And like a great storm, his intellectual play could swamp conceptual ramparts, sweep away fences, and leave in its wake a fresh intellectual landscape reflecting his impatience.

One idea in particular now fixated him, which he quickly sent to his friend Joseph Jones, an ally sitting in Virginia’s General Assembly. Madison had found a solution to attack the lack of confidence in the government itself, to bind the people to the government through a nexus imperii. He proposed to Jones that Virginia begin issuing war bonds—certificates that could be redeemed after the war ended, with interest. The scheme, he explained, would “anticipate during the war the future revenues of peace,” driving a war-weary public to strive, even more urgently, to win the war. It would also “compel” the people, he said, to “lend the public their commodities, as people elsewhere lend their money to purchase commodities.” The bonds would stop the collective enterprise from disintegrating into its constituent parts.⁷

But he heard only silence in response. Whether Jones was disinterested or the scheme fell flat when it was introduced on the floor, Virginia again failed not only to lead, but even to take a stab at resolving its fatal problem.

The situation frustrated Madison to no end. As winter approached and the days grew shorter, he complained to Edmund Pendleton that recruiting troops was not actually Virginia’s greatest problem. Instead, the lack of food, munitions, and clothing stemming from the lack of money, he said, “gives the greatest alarm.”⁸

WHILE MADISON WAS ANGERED BY AFFAIRS IN CONGRESS, HE WAS becoming strangely popular among the chattering classes in Philadelphia, who were fascinated by him. Attending the dances and gatherings required for a member of Congress, he displayed his customary chill among throngs of unfamiliar people—a shell noticeable to almost everyone. During his first year in Congress, he was attacked by Martha Bland, the wife of a dull, rival Virginia delegate named Theodorick Bland, as a “gloomy stiff creature.” “They say he is clever in Congress,” she reluctantly conceded, “but out of it he had nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners.” He was, she sniffed, the “most unsociable creature in existence.”9 He probably couldn’t have cared less what Martha Bland thought of him, and probably let her know it. He could turn hard and cold with those he did not like or know, and she was both.

His instinctive reserve had previously prevented him from speaking out in front of the hard-eyed, demanding men of Congress. But in November, the urgency of the moment finally spurred him to rise on the floor. The other men watched their young, bright-eyed colleague with curiosity; what could the tiny rural Virginian have to say?

HE BEGAN SPEAKING SO QUIETLY THAT IT WAS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT FOR the other men to hear him. He attacked the “evils arising from certificates & emissions” from the states. He then introduced a motion to prevent the states from printing any more money. The other congressmen did not applaud. Many appeared openly sour toward his idea. Several stood, in quick order, to attack his motion as “manifestly repugnant” to the nation’s existing financial system. Madison, hard-bitten student of public opinion as he was, realized the opposition was too great. He allowed his motion to die. He later bemusedly recounted to his friend Jones that his idea met with “so cool a reception” that he “did not much urge it.”¹⁰

But it was a small setback. His appetite for great change had been whetted. Meanwhile, a disorienting fog of war further cloaked the nation. Deep within, even crazy ideas were starting to appear reasonable.

AS AUTUMN CHILLED PHILADELPHIA AND WINTER FAST APPROACHED, Madison heard about a staggering proposal circulating Richmond to address Virginia’s flagging troop recruitment. The idea was to reward each new man who joined the army with a male slave between ten and forty years old, requisitioned from anyone who already owned over twenty slaves. Jones—normally a stable, trustworthy fellow—relayed the plan with qualified enthusiasm.¹¹ The grossly inhumane plan appalled Madison.

But something about the idea did catch his attention. Brainstorming, he hit upon a new formulation. Virginia, he imagined, could “liberate and make soldiers at once of the blacks themselves” instead of making them instruments for the enlistment of white soldiers. In other words, slaves would be recruited to the army with the promise of their freedom. Writing Jones, he suggested that his new scheme would certainly be more “consonant to the principles of liberty,” which, after all, “ought never to be lost sight of in a contest for liberty.”

His system, he thought, would also be more pragmatic. The new black soldiers, so grateful for their freedom, would be courteous and obedient. As for the concern that the new soldiers might try to free family members and friends who were still enslaved, he was not worried. He confidently argued that in his experience slaves, once freed, lost all “attachment & sympathy” with former fellow slaves.12

Back in Richmond, the idea of enticing white soldiers with the promise of personal slaves quickly capsized when slaveholders attacked it on the grounds that it would illegally seize their property and liberal legislators called it “inhuman and cruel.” But Madison’s idea fared no better. Jones politely informed Madison that enlisting black men with the promise of liberation would not only require the immediate abolition of slavery—which was impossible—but would probably also lead the British to reprise Dunmore’s earlier attempt to recruit black soldiers en masse. Just as bad, Jones said, would be the simple economic impact on Virginia. Without slaves, the southern states would collapse.¹³ Jones apparently refused to carry Madison’s measure at all.

While enthusiastic, Madison’s creative proposal exposed a flaw in his thinking. Too confident in the power of a logical idea, too committed to control as an end in itself, he completely outthought himself. For how could such a scheme ever work in practice, really? But Madison, undaunted, kept brainstorming.

RESTLESSLY WALKING THROUGH THE COBBLED PHILADELPHIA STREETS, Madison seemed powered by an internal energy source. He sustained an intense pace of activity in Philadelphia, making friends with like-minded delegates around the capital who collectively took a perverse pleasure in bemoaning the country’s precarious state. But as a collapse seemed increasingly imminent, the drama became less beguiling, and his sensitivity returned.

During the autumn of his first year in Philadelphia, he fell ill.14 There were no soothing hot springs in Philadelphia, only the respite of the guest house, and so he retreated to bed. He complained bitterly about his health to his friends, and word quickly spread back to Virginia that Orange’s precocious yet fragile son again stood on a brink. In early March 1781, his cousin the reverend wrote worriedly from Williamsburg, “I have heard of a severe Attack.”¹⁵ It was only by late March, a year after he arrived in the city, that his health was finally, in Madison’s words, “re-establish’d.”¹⁶

IN VIRGINIA, THE BRITISH GENERAL CORNWALLIS LAUNCHED A RENEWED assault, reasoning, “Until Virginia is reduced we could not hold the more Southern provinces.” Patches of Tory resistance to the revolution broke out. In the spring of 1781, when the General Assembly met for a single day in Richmond, word spread that Cornwallis was poised to seize the city and capture the delegates.

The assembly, including Patrick Henry, fled on their horses for Charlottesville, sixty miles away. After a short respite, they learned the British were in close pursuit. Henry and three other men left for Staunton, another forty miles away. Once there, they hid in a deep gorge. When night came, they sought shelter from an older woman living in a lone cabin, whose husband and sons had just left to fight in Charlottesville. Henry explained that they were members of the legislature. “Ride on then, ye cowardly knaves,” the woman retorted. Henry asked her whether she would shelter even Patrick Henry, if he had fled. “Patrick Henry would never do such a cowardly thing,” she indignantly responded.

He then explained that he was, in fact, Patrick Henry. The old woman gaped. The revolutionary hero—there on her porch! “Well, then, if that’s Patrick Henry, it must be all right,” she exclaimed. “Come in,” she cried, waving the four men in, “and ye shall have the best I have in the house.”¹⁷ She fed and protected the men that night.

She was one of Patrick Henry’s sworn people—just one in a legion.

IMAGE 11.1. PATRICK HENRY, BY THOMAS SULLY. COURTESY OF HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF VIRGINIA.

BACK IN PHILADELPHIA, MADISON WAS DEALING WITH MUCH MORE mundane matters, and with considerably less flair. Like the nation, he found himself occupying an unfamiliar economic stratum in the busy city, where the richest 10 percent of the population owned over half the wealth. Most of them were merchants who usually kept a town house in the city as well as a country estate within about ten miles. These homes were filled with mahogany furniture and silver services and were reached not on horseback but by expensive four-wheel carriages.18

To succeed in Philadelphia, Madison knew he must travel among those people. He would need to buy good wine and fine dinners, maintain horses and footmen, and keep clean and fashionable breeches, waistcoats, ruffles, buttons, and boots. He also would need to buy cord upon cord of precious firewood to heat his room in the city’s frigid winter. But he had no income other than what his father and the Virginia government sent him, and he had to beg for both on a continual basis. He was humiliated by his father’s refusal to send him an adequate allowance.

Worse, he could not collect on a loan he had made to his friend Edmund Randolph, then Virginia’s attorney general. Randolph was Madison’s complement in some respects, but they were also quite different men. Randolph’s face was broad and calm, his demeanor open, but his pleasant persona concealed considerable tumult. After the Declaration of Independence, Randolph’s father sided with the British and returned to England. Randolph endured continuing shame about his father’s treachery. He was charismatic and intelligent, but unusually emotional and sometimes tendentious, more raw and unpredictable than more studied politicians—in other words, he needed cipher even more than Madison did.

In early 1781, Randolph had asked Madison for a loan of twenty pounds—perhaps two thousand dollars in today’s currency. His prestigious position did not pay enough for Randolph to live on and pay the ignominious debts of his father. He was forced to maintain a private practice, staying on as attorney general to prevent his father’s debtors from pursuing him, because, as a sitting state official, he could not be sued.19 By the next year, Madison, struggling to stay afloat in the capital, asked Randolph to repay him.²⁰ At the same time, he pleaded with Randolph to work in Richmond to increase the salary for Virginia’s delegates.²¹ Randolph responded a little tartly, noting that “the great fulcrum of life in the extravagant city” of Philadelphia was to blame, and promising Madison nothing.²²

Madison had no other options left. He reluctantly trudged down Front Street to a little office near a coffeehouse to visit a well-known lender named Haym Solomon to ask for a private loan. To hock himself seems beneath his station. But he simply had no choice.

A friendly, stooped man even smaller than Madison greeted him. Madison’s embarrassment quickly dissolved in the face of Solomon’s humility. After listening to his problems, Solomon told Madison that he would loan him the money he needed, but from his personal funds, and at a below-market interest rate. He explained to Madison that customarily high interest rates were “so usurious” that nobody should use them except, perhaps, speculators.

IMAGE 11.2. EDMUND RANDOLPH. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA.

A strange kinship quickly developed between the two men. Madison was soon recounting to Edmund Randolph the “kindness of our little friend.”23 Anti-Semitism was as rife in America as anywhere else. The European stereotypes evident in the Shylock figure in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice were familiar to Madison and other colonial Americans. Yet in the months to come, Madison decidedly avoided anti-Semitism in his dealings with Solomon. By contrast, Randolph, who also borrowed from Solomon, mocked him as the “little Levite,” complaining that he felt “most sorely” the “wounds” inflicted by “Haym Solomon, and divers other jews.” Randolph even saw little Solomon as a menace, worrying that the moneylender and his brethren might throw him into jail if he failed to repay his debts with interest.²⁴

Madison’s affection toward Haym Solomon, as contrasted with Randolph’s embrace of virulent stereotypes, reveals Madison’s fundamental generosity, his capacity for sympathy with the downtrodden. Solomon lived only a little while longer. He used his own money to set up a business purchasing military supplies and selling them to the government, but he only rarely demanded the government repay him. He died in 1784, leaving behind no property other than his unpaid claims against the government, which were discovered and validated posthumously by Congress.25

The loan from Solomon relieved Madison’s circumstance only temporarily; he continued to feel vulnerable financially. When he wanted to purchase a library full of scarce and necessary books, available for about a quarter of their normal price, he pleaded with his father to help pay for them.²⁶ Over a month later, when his father still had not responded, Madison rashly bought the books with a draft on his father’s name. He wrote his father afterward, “I hope you will be able to find means to satisfy it,” suggesting that if it could “not be otherwise done,” then the elder Madison could deduct the amount from any “further supply you have in contemplation for me”—his inheritance. Of that drastic scenario, he wrote, “I must submit to it.”²⁷

Thirty years old, Madison still saw money as an instrument of “submission” to his father. He complained about his “arrearages.” He even threatened that unless “liberal principles” prevailed, he would be “under the necessity of selling a negro”—a particularly fraught threat, for his father knew that his son did not view his slaves as only property.²⁸

Madison escalated matters by employing what we might call today emotional blackmail. He informed his father that the state of his finances could even prevent him from coming home after the legislative session. He needed a new carriage, he said, but could not afford it.²⁹

Finally, he had hit upon an argument that would work. His father, probably anxious about the effect of a long absence on Madison’s doting mother, at last relented—and sent the money.

MADISON MUST HAVE LOOKED DOWN AT HIS BLACK BREECHES IN EMBARRASSMENT as yet another delegate blasted the federal government where they all sat. He pondered the problem of how to convince, or induce, or force, the states to fund the government fighting their war for them. In January 1781, Madison had decided he was finished waiting. On February 3, less than a year after arriving in Congress, he rose on the floor and, in his soft voice, read out a measure that “earnestly recommend[ed]” that each state implement a new 5 percent tariff on all imports, with the monies going directly to the federal government.

John Witherspoon had become, by this time, a delegate to Congress from New Jersey. Madison saw him often in Philadelphia, and the two men had maintained their easy friendship from Princeton, ballasted by their mutual frustration with Congress. Madison met with his former professor and pressed him to support the tariff. Witherspoon not only agreed with his former student but took his idea a step further. He soon stood to introduce a motion that would empower Congress to regulate all commerce in every state, establishing a new and exclusive federal right to tax all imported goods.

Witherspoon’s radical resolution was defeated by a narrow vote of five states to four. But he succeeded in creating political space for a more moderate measure. Madison quickly stepped into the gap, proposing a version that would pass the funds through state governments first, rather than allowing Congress directly to collect the monies. And that version passed.

At first blush, Madison’s victory seemed hugely significant. The novice from Virginia had given Congress new power to govern both monetary policy and military supply, with a system uniquely designed for the country’s unique politics. But nothing was that easy in the Continental Congress. With Massachusetts taking the lead, the states rebelled against Madison’s nuanced solution.30

Madison pondered his loss, and he plotted.