MADISON WAS DOING BATTLE ON TWO FRONTS SIMULTANEOUSLY IN Philadelphia. On the one hand, he was fighting in Congress to strengthen the federal government and supply the soldiers. But he was also orchestrating support for the federal government back home in Virginia. Both contests usually felt exhausting and fruitless, and he gradually recognized that they both demanded a unified solution: coercion.
The federal government, he decided, must be able to coerce the states. His new ambition wove control as a philosophical matter into his political ambitions for the country. Searching for an opportunity to present his case, he seized on a new committee charged with giving Congress the “necessary powers” for executing the Articles of Confederation in the states. In essence, Congress wanted to give itself the power to actually govern based on its own laws, which would require federal officials to overrule their state counterparts. Madison quickly went to work, within a week helping to draft a startling new amendment to the Articles of Confederation that would give sweeping new powers to Congress—and, at long last, simply force the states to obey.
Madison’s shocking amendment stated that if any of the states “shall refuse or neglect to abide by the determinations of the United States in Congress assembled,” that Congress would be “fully authorized to employ the force of the United States as well by sea as by land to compel such State or States to fulfill their federal engagements.” The amendment even gave the federal government power to prevent dissenting states from “trade and intercourse,” both domestic and foreign—meaning Congress could bend a state to its will by choking off its commerce.1
Madison desperately needed allies for his bold new idea. He thought of his friend Thomas Jefferson, who had only recently made the startling decision to step down from Virginia’s governorship.2 Madison mailed Jefferson an envelope, including the amendment. Despite a rocky end to his governorship, the author of the Declaration of Independence still wielded substantial political authority. His support of coercion, Madison fervently believed, could help tip the balance. The “delicacy and importance of the subject,” he urged his friend, required his support in Congress.3
Madison tensely awaited Jefferson’s answer. But the former governor simply refused to respond. Two weeks after Madison asked Jefferson for his approval, he again wrote Jefferson, with labored politesse. “I hope your Excellency has recd. my letter inclosing a copy of a plan reported to Congress for arming them with co-ercive authority,” he wrote. “Your first leisure moments,” he continued, “will I flattered myself favor me with your idea of the matter.”4
But there was still no response.
Five months passed before Jefferson wrote Madison back, but he did not even acknowledge Madison’s springtime request for support of the amendment; he obliquely asked for the “opportunity of saving the right of correspondence with you which otherwise might be lost by desuetude,” while complaining that he was “so far from the scene of action and so recluse” that he simply was unable to comment on current events.5
Winter passed, but still no word from Jefferson about coercion. On January 15, 1782, Madison again wrote Jefferson, this time to plainly complain, “Pray did you ever receive a letter from me inclosing a proposition declaratory of the coercive power of Congress over the States?” He prodded him further: “It went by an Express while you were at the head of the Exec.”6 But Jefferson never responded. Two years would pass before Madison finally dropped the matter.
These events revealed young Madison’s impetuosity, the radicalism of his ideas, and how committed he had become to control. He was advocating a Continental Congress that would be able essentially to make war on the states. Jefferson’s unsaid resistance probably stemmed from his skepticism that such an idea could actually exist in practice. Madison, undeterred, determined to refine his approach.
Meanwhile, at long last, Madison saw the end of the war approaching—and with it a new opportunity for the national order he craved.
IN OCTOBER 1781, WASHINGTON’S TROOPS ENCIRCLED EIGHT THOUSAND British troops in Yorktown. When news of General Cornwallis’s surrender reached Madison in Philadelphia, he was exhilarated. But he recognized that one surrender, however commanding, would not end a war. The British command and allies were diffuse, the delays long and tactically significant, and the gray area between war and peace—the negotiations—as knotty and intricate as any battle plan.
The war would have to end sometime, but he knew the terms of peace could also end up being a cure as bad—or even worse than—the disease. Brainstorming, he again came up with a scheme to break the back of British resistance: to reestablish trade relations with Great Britain (thereby expanding relations with and the sympathies of the kingdom’s influential commercial class), while expanding federal control over the western territories (thus increasing America’s territory, population, and tax base at the expense of Great Britain).7 Again, he saw his old professor as key to his strategy. He traveled to Princeton, sat down with Witherspoon, and presented his idea. The bearish, lugubrious man, now almost sixty, heard out his energetic former student. Madison amusedly recounted to Randolph his effort to get the phlegmatic man “to move in the business.”8 Under Madison’s cheerful pressure, the professor relented and agreed to introduce the motion in Congress.
But opponents both of western expansion and trade dealings with the kingdom came together to defeat the motion.9 The status quo again proved too powerful for Madison’s rear guard actions. He would have to shake the country out of its torpor himself.
MEANWHILE, AS MUCH AS MADISON LOATHED THE BRITISH, HE WAS darkly impressed by their devious extension of the war, which should have concluded by then, in Yorktown. They seemed to intend infinitely to drag on negotiations about what would actually constitute peace. In May 1782, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a unanimous resolution instructing its congressmen—Madison included—to continue the war with “Vigour and Effect” until peace was obtained “in a Manner consistent with our National Faith and Foederal Union.” Any peace that separated the United States from her allies, the resolution emphasized, would be “insidious and inadmissible.”10 Madison was incensed by how the British exploited every appearance of weakness. The federal government could not fight the British if it could not fight its own states. And the troops’ ragged and mutinous condition suggested the war could indeed be drawn out for years. With the New Year of 1783, Madison and many others decided they could close out the war by funding it adequately and by compelling the states to cooperate.
On January 27, 1783, Madison watched with great interest as a bespectacled Scottish lawyer named James Wilson rose on the floor. Two years before the Revolution, Wilson had published a famous pamphlet boldly arguing that the British Parliament lacked the authority to pass laws for the American colonies because the colonies lacked representation in Parliament. Madison respected him immensely. Standing, Wilson praised his adoptive country’s intrepidity and remarkable optimism against the hated British. However, one area where his new countrymen had fallen short, he declared, was in the “cheerful payment of taxes.” Given Americans’ “peculiar repugnance” to taxation, he argued that Congress needed at long last to collect general taxes.
For Madison, the word general was the key. Congress would not be limited to asking for specific money for specific causes; it could finally tax all the states to fund the federal government itself. Madison also liked that Wilson employed actual facts in his argument. Before the war, Wilson continued bluntly, the British people had each paid about twenty-five pounds sterling per year to their government. But the United States rate was the equivalent of only ten pounds per person. How could an ambitious new country keep up with her oppressor on such shaky financial footing?11
Theodorick Bland, with whom Madison would frequently clash in later months and years, indignantly rose. Madison watched with disbelief as Bland argued that even if Wilson’s facts were right, the delegates should still oppose his plan because Congress, even with a general taxation power, would still treat the states unequally, burdening the poor more than the rich. Bland suggested a deceptively mild replacement—to base the states’ tax burden instead on the value of their lands.12 Madison saw a poison pill in Bland’s seemingly innocuous proposal. By allowing wealthy states to dominate poorer ones, the latter would then revolt against the coalition. That would replicate the very problem already preventing the states from yielding some measure of their sovereignty to the federal government.
The assembly adjourned without making a decision. That night, Madison finalized his notes, collected his thoughts, and prepared to dive into the fray.
What he had decided to do would mark the marriage of his evolving character and his emerging ideas. All of Madison’s preparation in Virginia, and his self-forced march from sensitivity to assertiveness, was a prologue for what was to come: his demand that the states be required to pay a fixed percentage of their revenues to the federal government.
In the parlance of the time, this was known as an impost, but that obscure word has lost so much of its meaning over the years that it is simpler and more direct for the purposes of our story to describe the proposal’s effects rather than its label. What Madison wanted was a forced contribution, and it was for that purpose—that form of what could only be called coercion—that he employed what I am describing as his “Method”:
Find passion in your conscience. Focus on the idea, not the man. Develop multiple and independent lines of attack. Embrace impatience. Establish a competitive advantage through preparation. Conquer bad ideas by dividing them. Master your opponent as you master yourself. Push the state to the highest version of itself. Govern the passions.
STANDING THE NEXT DAY, HE INTRODUCED IN HIS QUIET BUT FIRM VOICE A motion stating the “opinion of Congress” that the “establishment of permanent & adequate funds” that would “operate generally throughout” the country was “indispensibly necessary for doing complete justice to the Creditors of the U.S., for restoring public credit, & for providing for the future exigencies of the war.” Those delegates paying attention noticed Madison was really offering only a preamble to something much larger he seemed to have in mind. He was not only refusing to back down in the face of Theodorick Bland’s argument from futility; he was going to war for an absolute new federal power.
In a huff, his fellow Virginian, Arthur Lee—a small-minded nemesis of all things federal—stood. The states would never agree to a general power, he said. Putting the purse “in the same hands with the sword” would totally destroy the country’s “fundamental principles of liberty.” Lee boasted that he had helped torpedo the forced contribution on those very grounds in Virginia.13
The battle lines were taking shape, for giving the power of the purse to the power of the sword was exactly what Madison wanted: to invest the federal government with coercive power by funding it. The whole matter was now in the open, and Madison began with a broadside. For the nation’s independence to rest on the “ruins of public faith and national honor,” he said impatiently, should be “horrid” to anyone with “either honesty or pride.”
He then posed a stark question to the audience. How would they pay the country’s debt? There were two, he explained—and only two—possible answers: Either the principal must be paid, or the interest that was accruing. There was no other option.
The first possibility, he explained, was simply “impossible on any plan.” There was not enough money in the federal treasury to pay off the entire war debt at once. That left Congress with only the second option—paying the interest.
Then he pushed his audience toward a second fork in the road. To pay the interest, there were again only two possible plans. There could be occasional “requisitions” on the states allowed by the Articles of Confederation. Or, each state could establish a permanent fund to regularly pay its share of the debt. But both possibilities had fatal problems. No one would lend to America if the government had to beg the states, over and over, for funds. As for the second path, he pointed out that the states would demand endless perks from the federal government in exchange for their permanent funds. This would erode the central government while leading to violent jealousy among the states—an outcome, he said, that was “too radical.”
The opponents of a federal power must have stared sullenly as the small man informed them that they simply had no choice, that their only option left was to “examine the merits of the plan of a general revenue operating throughout the U.S. under the superintendence of Congress.”
He then launched a numbing series of proofs for the superiority of the forced contribution.
It would reduce jealousy among the states. It would prevent them from diverting money from the federal government to their own capitals. It would give “instantaneous confidence” to the country’s creditors. It was, further, legitimate and authorized, as the states had already given Congress the constitutional authority over both purse and sword.
Yes, he granted that some states did oppose the new power. Yes, the prospects for a forced contribution were “less encouraging than were to be wished.” But still, he stated defiantly, several states had already agreed to send their 5 percent. And that logically meant all of them eventually could.
He paused to acknowledge a painful point: the recent collapse of the campaign for a forced contribution in Virginia. The Virginia legislature had appeared to support the contribution, but word had only recently reached Philadelphia that the Virginia legislature would now oppose it. This is what Arthur Lee had taken credit for.
Madison admitted that his home state’s withdrawal was an “embarrassment.” But he was determined to fight on—he must fight on. He owed allegiance not only to Virginia, but to the “collective interests of the whole.” A congressman, he said, “ought to hazard personal consequences” out of respect for “what his clear conviction determines to be the true interest” of the state.
Finally, he knew, from the “knowledge of public affairs which his station commanded,” that the Virginia legislature would not have repealed the forced contribution, if they knew what he knew. Madison simply asserted his will, because he knew his conscience.
The end result, he concluded, was that Congress had a duty to implement a general tax to pay the debt.14 They simply had no choice.
FINISHED, HE SAT DOWN. WHEN HIS STUNNED OPPONENTS GOT BACK ON their feet, they found themselves playing on a battlefield drawn, defined, and controlled by Madison. Arthur Lee redundantly blustered that nobody who had ever “opened a page or read a line on the subject of liberty” could ignore the “danger of surrendering the purse into the same hand which held the sword.”15 But Madison’s motion was seconded.
Later that night, scribbling in candlelight at the boardinghouse, he summarized the state of affairs to Randolph. He had done his best. If the forced contribution did not pass on a full vote, he wrote, “the foundations of our Independence will be laid in injustice & dishonor.” He confided his fear that the failure to fund the federal government would make the union “of short duration.”
He was cruelly disappointed when Congress, in its dysfunction, threw up its collective hands and tossed his motion into a committee. In that sausage mill, his clear and principled bill was ground into an “earnest recommendation” that the states impose a 5 percent tax on only foreign goods, with the proceeds only put toward debts and war efforts, and then only for twenty-five years.16 Lee, of course, seconded the butchered motion. The replacement dismayed even Theodorick Bland, who said it was “replete with injustice & repugnant to every idea of finance.”17
Madison realized that he could not simply send a fragile idea into the jungle of public opinion and hope it would survive. More militant measures were required. One idea he excitedly shared with Randolph was for a “free & well informed gazette” that would “sufficiently counteract the malignant rumours.” Setting up what he described as an “antidote” would, he explained, be an “easy & oeconomical task” that would dispel the “state of darkness” resulting from a “want of a diffusion of intelligence.”18
Aside from his brainstorm of a sophisticated media arm for the allies who would soon enough describe themselves as Federalists, Madison also knew he must improve on what he had employed in his promising but unsuccessful campaign for the forced contribution—what I am describing here as his Method.
In the coming years, he would implement this Method every time he launched a war against a bad idea and erected, on the ruins, his own ideas. He devised the Method intuitively as a replacement for the derisive and imbalanced Socratic Method that he had criticized so harshly as a teenage student. He never named it. Indeed, he rarely reflected on his strategies at all. But his approach always had nine key elements:
First, find passion in your conscience. From his lessons at the elbows of his fierce Scottish mentors, Donald Robertson and John Witherspoon, to his earliest response to religious repression in Virginia, he never wavered from the gravitational pull of his conscience. The almost physical impulse of his sense of right and wrong drove his political decisions as surely as a magnet pulls a compass’s needle. By a conscience inspired by general matters of right and wrong—by those issues affecting entire states or the whole country—he brought tremendous conviction to his arguments about policy, at the same time illuminating the motives of opposing politicians as selfish and shortsighted. Thus, Chief Justice John Marshall, toward the end of his life, when asked who, of all the orators he had ever heard, was the most eloquent, said, “Eloquence has been defined to be the art of persuasion. If it includes persuasion by convincing, Mr. Madison was the most eloquent man I ever heard.”19
Second, focus on the idea, not the man. As powerful as politicians and citizens were, he saw ideas as the primary agent of history. A powerful idea could structure a vision of a future, spark men’s passions, and overpower political alliances. He knew that if he destroyed the idea, the man behind it would not matter. Conversely, the right idea could be as radiant and generative as the sun. And so he concentrated on demolishing destructive ideas and elevating good ones. While that approach deprived him of the sweeping emotion customary to interpersonal political dramas, it lent his arguments a purity and force that was vastly more compelling to an observer.
Third, develop multiple and independent lines of attack. He appreciated clean, elegant, simple ideas—the singularity of religious freedom, the need to balance factions—as much as any man. But he also believed that killing a noxious idea required diverse and overwhelming force, not conceptual or tactical parsimony. As a political matter, then, Madison deployed a wide range of differentiated attacks—historical, logical, moral, emotional. Any one of these could be persuasive in its own right, but together they comprised a devastating assault.
Fourth, embrace impatience. Many forces conspire, in politics, to favor the patient. Legislation moves slowly; coalitions take time and steadiness to build and bond; public opinion must be shifted; and, perhaps most importantly, leaders who are too restless, who resist the proven benefits of steady pressure, will burn out. Yet time and again, Madison defied those proven patterns and instead embraced the power of impatience. Madison exposed the vulnerability of his opponents; while inertia was daunting, it was also lumbering and inept. With urgent, even fierce action, he could hammer a flawed system at its weakest points and conquer it.
Fifth, establish a competitive advantage through preparation. As both an eager student and bruised competitor in politics, Madison understood all too well the need to dominate an opponent. But because he lacked, himself, the rhetorical skills and the emotional magnitude of more theatrically impressive enemies, he developed his advantage on different grounds—through information and through preparation. With greater depth than his competitors, he could defeat their arguments on substantive grounds. By designing his battle plans ahead of time, he could anticipate his enemy and force them to play on his ground.
Sixth, conquer bad ideas by dividing them. Beginning in his college days at Princeton, Madison developed a disarmingly simple habit of isolating a question into two—and only two—options. By analyzing only two sides of a question, he could play each against the other. By making his audience consider only two options, he gave himself profound control over their own consideration of his problem. He would lead others down an intellectual path where their landscape narrowed, step by step, putting them increasingly within Madison’s control.
Seventh, master your opponent as you master yourself. Madison developed, over the years, habits of mind and patterns of discipline to deal with his own hypersensitivity. His tenacity and his durability were strikingly similar to the posture he urged upon the country to address its own weaknesses. While he was not above bemoaning his situation—indeed, his melodrama about his health became a leitmotif until his old age—as a practical matter, he managed his sensitivity by concentrating on achievable objectives, subordinating the complaints of his mind and body to the dictates of political necessity, and forging ahead.
Eighth, push the state to the highest version of itself. It was the achievement of the state—the form of the state and national governments, the sort of men who took positions within government, and the actions government took—that most concerned Madison. And so he focused on the state above all else—above personality, culture, region, even family. He was unwilling to compromise on the overarching goal: that democratic government should achieve its greatest potential, that it should become the greatest and most noble version of itself. This common thread united his many projects—whether to reform aspects of government or overhaul entire sections of government itself. Government itself could and must always improve.
Ninth and last, govern the passions. The greatest danger Madison saw for America lay within the body politic itself. The passions were native to human beings and thus to democracy. His project since youth had been to discipline, tame, and channel the passions. The checks and balances Madison ultimately proposed in his constitution would help contain the passions, preventing them from taking over entirely. But to channel and govern them would require leaders like Madison—individuals with the mission of steering the anger and love and hatred and enthusiasm of the country’s people toward governance of themselves.
TO AN ADVERSARY, MADISON’S METHOD WAS MADDENING AT BEST AND infuriating at worst. As physically slight as he was, Madison seemed indefatigable, almost to burn with an inner intensity. He always knew more than you. He had anticipated most of your moves and seemed to have planned out everything he would say. He dragged his audience through a series of choices they had no option but to make, toward conclusions they had no choice but to accept. If you responded to one point, there were always countless others to deal with as well. It was a Socratic dialogue without the question marks—a symphony of preparation, discipline, and control. Every attempt you made to bait him—to trick him or play to his ego—would be avoided by a return to the plan. And, most importantly, if you ever revealed yourself to be combating for any selfish or special interest, that fact would become garish in contrast to his self-evident conscience, in contrast to the fact that he really did seem to have the common good at heart.
THREE MONTHS AFTER THE INITIAL COLLAPSE OF HIS FORCED CONTRIBUTION, Madison rose to deliver the results of a committee Congress had convened to further study the proposal. In those three months, he had sharpened every aspect of his Method.
Find passion in your conscience. Focus on the idea, not the man. Develop multiple and independent lines of attack. Embrace impatience. Establish a competitive advantage through preparation. Conquer bad ideas by dividing them. Master your opponent as you master yourself. Push the state to the highest version of itself. Govern the passions.
Standing, Madison coldly laid out the facts of the debt, speaking almost as a teacher to a student, educating and disciplining at once. The total amount, he announced, was a stunning 42 million dollars. Interest payments alone demanded 2 million dollars annually. Only a 5 percent contribution from each state would be worthy of the Revolution—“a full reward for the blood, the toils, the cares and the calamities which have purchased it.” Most important, the scheme must require the states to comply. They could be allowed no choice in the matter.
By so openly employing his own conviction, he at once elevated the debate and threw his opponents off balance. The “pride and boast” of the American experiment, he explained, was the fight for rights basic to human nature. The delegates could achieve that promise through the forced contribution. If it passed, he promised, the revolutionary cause would acquire “dignity and lustre.” The nation would stand as a city on a hill, with the “most favourable influence on the rights of mankind.”
But if the federal government disintegrated because it could not even fund its own operations, he ominously predicted that the “last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of human nature” would be “insulted and silenced by the votaries of Tyranny and Usurpation.”20
While he again failed to gain a majority for the forced contribution, his eloquent, puissant speech earned Madison his first truly national audience. His supporters in Congress reprinted the speech in a pamphlet along with exhibits and a plan of the new revenues the forced contribution would generate. They then mailed thousands of copies around the country. Private reprints were made in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Virginia—and England and France. General Washington wrote a circular praising Madison’s address for “so much dignity and energy that in my opinion, no real friend of the honor and independency of America can hesitate a single moment.” If Madison’s speech did not “produce conviction,” Washington warned, a national bankruptcy, “with all its deplorable consequences,” would occur.21
By the summer, the pamphlet had spread to his cousin the reverend in Williamsburg. “I have seen with much Pleasure the Pamphlet,” he beamed, and praised the speech as “well calculated to direct the mind to important Objects.”22
Meanwhile, that same spring, Madison was appointed to a prestigious peace committee whose members also included Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson.23 He would now be on the front lines of finalizing the whole nation’s standing with her former oppressor—at last closing the nation’s bloody first chapter, while opening her hopefully promising next one.
THE MORE MADISON’S REPUTATION AS A WARRIOR FOR THE FORCED contribution grew in Philadelphia, the more Henry, back in Virginia, sensed a threat.24 In May, Jefferson wrote Madison in cipher that Henry “as usual” was “involved in mystery.” “Should the popular tide run strongly in either direction,” Jefferson predicted, Henry would “fall in with it.”25 The legislature scheduled debate on the forced contribution for early May in Richmond. A heated whisper campaign began among both friends and foes, triggering waves of political organizing. When the day came, hundreds of men turned up—more than had appeared in the legislative chamber at one time for many years.26
Henry strafed the measure for its short-term financial cost to Virginians. Randolph listened in disbelief as Henry argued to the chamber that taxes should actually be lower than they currently were. Heads nodded; Henry’s antifederal invective seemed to be catching fire in the chamber.27
But after the meeting, public opinion on the topic turned so volatile that it slipped through even Henry’s nimble fingers. Virginians appeared torn between their loyalty to their state and the obvious dysfunction of the federal government. A sizable plurality emerged in favor of the forced contribution as a distasteful but necessary means to fund a distasteful but necessary federal government. Trimming his positions accordingly, Henry began a pattern of dizzying reversals. A week later, he suddenly announced he had become a “strenuous supporter” of the forced contribution, albeit with certain restrictions, such as preventing federal tax collectors from tramping through Virginia to collect new monies. Henry, Randolph recounted satirically, “ludicrously offered an easy remedy” of “drawing the teeth and cutting the nails of the officers of revenue.”28
The contrast with the fixity of Madison’s principled stance—his conscience—could not have been starker, especially to Madison. But Henry’s facility with words and politics gave him advantages in the roiling democratic sea; Madison admitted to Randolph his deep concern about the powerful influence of “eloquent mouths” like Henry’s. But he also felt he had earned the upper hand over such vulgar appeals. Unless the forced contribution’s enemies could come up with another option “equally consistent with public justice & honour,” he brashly predicted to Randolph that “all those who love justice and aim at the public good” would support his plan.29
Two weeks later, Henry took up a populist banner and argued that, instead of approaching the general populace for the revenue, Virginia should instead aim for the “pockets of the wealthy consumer”—in other words, soaking the rich.30 He festooned the forced contribution with even more conditions certain to doom it, arguing that the federal government should compensate Virginia for any amount that was over her quota—a plainly unworkable idea for a transparently broke Congress.31 Virginia’s legislators tried to follow Henry’s looping lead, asserting that it was the federal government instead that owed Virginia 1 million pounds.32
Having unleashed this chaos, Henry summarily departed Richmond for Leatherwood, his estate in Hanover County. Randolph was appalled by the wreckage Henry left in his wake. He wrote Madison that Henry had intentionally made an “abortion” out of the forced contribution.33 The saving grace, he said bemusedly, was that Henry’s “sight for home” had exposed him “to a daily loss of his popularity.” But that was precious little consolation; for Randolph admitted that the master of the people could “always recover himself in interest by an exertion.”34
He was more public than ever; but with his escalating radicalism, his increasing seniority, and his penchant for control, he also began to move into the shadows.
WHETHER IN CANDLELIT TAVERNS OR THE FLICKERING FIRELIGHT OF boardinghouses, Madison realized he needed secrecy to communicate effectively and to broker deals. With their single drivers and exposed cargo, the mail carriages traveling from Philadelphia to Virginia were easy targets for bandits and spies. Congress had formally mandated cipher—the composition and decoding of written text through complex numerical codes—for sensitive wartime correspondence with a resolution stating, “If an original page is of such a nature as cannot be safely transmitted without cyphers, a copy in cyphers, signed by the Secretary for the department of foreign affairs, shall be considered as authentic.”35
As he began taking committee assignments covering such delicate matters as the naval budget and negotiations with the French, Madison became militant about secrecy in both his official business and his private correspondence. He started writing significant portions of his letters to his friends in cipher, which required him to meticulously compose blocks of text in letters or numbers, often in candlelight, glancing back and forth from long sheets of paper, as he wrote words by characters, phrases by words, paragraphs by sentences, all one by one.
On May 28, 1782, he told Joseph Jones (italics show the words that he composed in code), that Virginia should announce “the sense of the people” for a strong peace, which would be “regarded as more authentic than a declaration from Congress.”*36 The code enabled Madison to speak honestly about Congress’s weakness, while controlling the consequences.
That same summer, hunched over his desk, Madison laboriously decoded a letter from Edmund Randolph. Meticulously parsing three-numeral sequences for their lettered equivalent (344, for example, was the code for nd), Madison learned that Randolph suspected there was a plot to eject both men from office by raising fears that they were both too compromised to serve Virginia effectively—specifically, Madison’s enemies were charging that his notorious study of the law was distracting him. His enemies had attacked him under the “garb of friendship,” Randolph wrote, “It was lamented, that the rigour of law should cut off so [here, Randolph forgot to insert an adjective for “well-deserving”] a servant from public employment.”37
Randolph and Madison retreated further into the darkness. As the wartime negotiations went on and as their suspicions about spying increased, Randolph suggested to Madison that they continue to use the official government cipher when talking about intelligence on public policy, but switch to a new cipher to communicate about individuals. Madison agreed and suggested a new cipher invented by James Lovell, a highly regarded delegate from Massachusetts. For a keyword, he proposed the name of Cupid, one of his cousin the reverend’s young slaves.38 Randolph readily agreed, admitting, “I have been in some pain from the danger incident to the cypher we now use.” The British, he knew, were intercepting and even publishing ciphers.39
Secrecy, for Madison, was fast becoming not only a means but the end itself. When evaluating Virginia’s proposed scheme to redeem old paper currency for new specie, for instance, Madison found the “defect of information” made it impossible for him to “deduce the general interest.” He proposed a solution to Randolph: that he gather the sense of the legislature through a private meeting of its leading men. The stakes of secrecy were incredibly high; Madison told Randolph that if anyone got word of the new currency schemes, they would snap up specie in even greater amounts, in a “revival of Speculation.”40 That could push the nation even more quickly over a fiscal cliff.
IN THE NEW IMPERATIVE OF SECRECY, CONTROL WAS BECOMING NOT JUST A matter of political philosophy for Madison. It was the substance of his very being. But despite his best efforts, the passions he had so carefully cabined were about to wreak havoc in his tightly wound life.
* The letter was a ship in the night, however; unbeknownst to Madison, Virginia had already passed the instruction. “To Joseph Jones,” May 28, 1782, Robert A. Rutland et al., eds., Papers of James Madison, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962–), 291n.