26 Retaliation

THROUGH THE AUTUMN OF 1788, HENRY FULMINATED AGAINST THE Constitution on the floor of the General Assembly. One friend wrote Madison from Richmond that “the Cloven hoof begins to appear.”¹ In October, Madison traveled to New York for a wistful event—the final quorum of the now-defunct Continental Congress. As Henry plotted for a second convention, the forces were again arraying themselves into young versus old. In Richard Bland Lee’s words, the Federalists, all “young & inexperienced,” formed “but a feeble band against” Henry.² Trying to recover his power after the Richmond debacle, Henry sought to become even more of a colossus, and for his Virginia to become a redoubt of anti-Federalist might. He specifically intended to hand pick a new General Assembly and congressional delegation that would serve as his personal political machine. By November, Washington wrote Madison of Henry, “He has only to say let this be Law—and it is Law.”³

A crucial question facing Virginia was the election of two new senators to the new federal government. Were it not for Patrick Henry, James Madison was the natural choice. But Henry wanted to destroy him as a political force in Virginia. In November, he asserted on the floor of the General Assembly that Madison could not be trusted with the people’s confidence “in the station of Senator.” His election, insisted Henry, would lead to civil war between north and south, to “rivulets of blood throughout the land.”⁴

Washington wanted Madison in the Senate, where he told his young friend his services would “be of more importance than in the other House.”⁵ Another friend wrote Madison from Richmond to argue that he must pursue a Senate seat, in part because it would prevent the dreadful scenario of two anti-Federalist Virginia senators.⁶ Although some have suggested Madison did not want to be in the Senate,⁷ this is unpersuasive. True, he wrote Randolph that of the Senate and House “I prefer the latter chiefly because if I can render any service there, it can only be to the public, and not even in imputation, to myself.”8 But by the point he wrote this letter, he knew Henry had decided to kill his chances for the Senate; and his words to Randolph suggest self-protective reassurance, rather than his actual preference. After all, his vision of statesmanship in America had dictated not only his own course toward the common good but also his contributions to the design of the US Senate itself.

His friends, sensing the danger of Henry’s machinations, urgently demanded that Madison return home and actively campaign for the Senate. A surprise then came in the mail. “Your friends have resolved to nominate you,” Randolph wrote, “being well assured, that their labours will not be in vain.”⁹ Now an official candidate, Madison would have to defeat either Richard Henry Lee or Grayson. But his aversion to political campaigns had only increased. In an eerie echo of the ratifying convention, he delayed and delayed his return home. He confessed to Randolph that he might prefer the House to the Senate because a House victory could be easily arranged by his Orange County friends, which would avoid the “spirit of electioneering which I despise.”¹⁰ But he viewed even a campaign for the House with distaste and avoided the inevitable for over a month. He wrote Randolph that even though his friends were pressing him to return to fight the “machinations agst. my election” to the House, “I am extremely disinclined.”¹¹

At last, he decided to return to Virginia to campaign for the Senate, and, if he lost there, for the House. But in a cruel blast from fortune, he was waylaid by horrendously painful hemorrhoids. In a candid letter to Eliza Trist, he blamed the attack on “my sedentary life.” The piles were so painful that he could not even ride in a carriage. He was stuck in New York for over a week before leaving for Philadelphia.¹²

In the meantime, he knew he was losing valuable political ground in absentia. He fruitlessly complained to Washington that Virginia was the only state that had ratified the Constitution where the politics of the legislature—controlled by Henry—were “at variance with the sense of the people expressed by their representatives in Convention.”¹³

Madison, who was then in Philadelphia, stopped en route by another bout of hemorrhoids, never made it back to Virginia in time to campaign for the Senate. The day after the vote, a shaken Edward Carrington wrote to tell Madison that he had lost; the vote was 98 for Lee, 86 for Grayson, and 77 for Madison. It was Madison’s first electoral loss since April of 1777, when he was twenty-six years old and lost his reelection as a Virginia delegate. Carrington tried to reassure his friend. Because two-thirds of the assembly had opposed the new Constitution, he said, Madison’s relatively large total must have meant they voted “from personal regard against their own principles.”14 That Carrington took such pains to solace his friend further suggests Madison deeply wanted to serve in the nation’s highest body.

Henry Lee tried to reassure Madison, advising him to lose in the House, as well, so that he could go into George Washington’s administration—“the place proper for you.” But he also inadvertently admitted that the Senate loss was a “dreadful blow.”¹⁵

But Henry wasn’t finished yet.

HENRY WANTED TO ANNIHILATE MADISON IN VIRGINIA’S POLITICS AS definitively as Madison had conquered him in Virginia’s ratification. Madison’s backup plan was to return to Orange to run for, and win, a seat in the House of Representatives, but Henry and his allies began machinating against him on this front as well. The anti-Federalists inserted a clause in a new elections bill requiring any candidate to have maintained residence in their district for twelve straight months prior to the election—which, Carrington informed Madison, was “inserted with a veiw to you.”¹⁶

Madison’s supporters were appalled at Virginia’s “base ingratitude” toward him and the passions against him that Henry was shamelessly stoking. “They are all become abominable,” Francis Corbin railed, “and gone astray.”¹⁷ Madison’s countrymen urged him not to make the same mistake as with the Senate seat. “Come onwards to yr. Native Country,” wrote George Lee Turberville, declaring that there was “not a man upon Earth so adequate as you are to her salvation.”¹⁸

The second phase of Henry’s plot against Madison then appeared. With a wide-ranging speech on the General Assembly floor, Henry convinced a large majority to support a scheme that created a new congressional district that reached into deeply conservative areas of the Shenandoah Valley and Southside, shoving Madison’s own Orange County into a district of counties “most tainted with antifederalism.”¹⁹ Even worse, Henry had put Orange in the same House district with James Monroe’s home county of Spotsylvania.20 Monroe had already decided to run for the House, and so Henry’s maneuver was especially cruel, for Madison still was tremendously fond of Monroe despite their spirited opposition at the ratifying convention. Now, one would win and the other lose. Madison’s friend Turberville demanded that Madison “wing your way towards Virginia with all possible expedition.”²¹

A third phase of the strategy then surfaced: to ruin Madison’s venerated image. Henry and his allies began painting him as an arrogant enemy of any and all new rights for the average Virginian. It was being “busily circulated,” Carrington warned Madison, that he had “declared in Convention that the Constitution required no alteration whatever.”²²

Madison had a hard time accepting the collision that loomed ahead, especially because it would require a new level of intensity in the campaigning he detested. As December arrived, he further put off his return to Virginia. The agonizing hemorrhoids made everything worse. He admitted to Washington that they had “not yet entirely gone off” and might detain him in Philadelphia “for some days longer.”²³

When he finally started off for Virginia, he must have winced with every bounce on the rutted road. Along the way, he wrote Jefferson that the trip was “very disagreeable” and grumbled that going to Virginia would serve no purpose other than to “satisfy the Opinions and intreaties of my friends.”²⁴ But he was going. He had decided to fight, and he meant to win.

HE SUSPECTED THE ELECTION WOULD BE RAZOR THIN. A FRIEND reported that while both sides were sanguine of victory, “great exertions” were being made for Monroe—though the “assiduity & importunity” of his friends were stirring controversy.²⁵ Henry risked overshooting his mark, his brazen political intrigues tarnishing the image of the anti-Federalists. The “violence of the Antifederals,” Madison heard from Turberville, had “begun to arrouse suspicion.” Once the “Conduct of the great high preist” was known—Patrick Henry—his friend assured him the voters would side with Madison.²⁶ Another friend warned Madison not to trust anyone; his most “fervent open friends” could yet “prove the most Secret Enemys.”²⁷

IMAGE 26.1. JAMES MONROE. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Along the way home, Madison stopped at Mount Vernon for seven days around Christmas. Henry Lee and several others joined to celebrate a festive if nervy Christmas Eve with Washington, the conversation revolving around Washington’s soon-to-come inaugural address as the nation’s first president, as well as Madison’s hopeful election to the House.28 On December 27, Madison finally arrived back in Orange, with plans to begin campaigning in earnest after the New Year, for an election scheduled for February 2.

He had returned just in time. Monroe was already campaigning hard, writing “Myriads of Letters” to all the district’s counties,²⁹ and delivering speeches to “explain the Constitution to the People,” and to “erase any false impressions from their minds.” David Jameson, Madison’s dear old friend from their earliest days working as councilors to Patrick Henry as governor, urged Madison to immediately address the “anxiety to remove some false prejudices.”³⁰ Alarmed, Madison began to campaign in earnest.

Travel over the wintry roads could take over a day—Louisa alone was twenty-five miles away from Orange—and it was challenging to talk with voters in large groups. Madison thus visited with freeholders at county court days in Louisa and Culpeper to strenuously confront the “erroneous reports propagated agst. me.”31 He wrote detailed letters to local leaders and ministers that were then published in the local newspapers.

In these forums, in keeping with his Method, he ignored his opponent and concentrated on his ideas instead. In a letter to a resident of Monroe’s Spotsylvania County, quickly reprinted in the local paper, Madison expressed his “serious apprehensions” about a new constitutional convention. He proposed that with the Constitution safely embedded in the law, the better option was a bill of rights, which should include the popular rights of conscience, the press, and trial by jury.³² In another letter to a constituent, he defended his old system of forced contributions and swiped at the anti-Federalists’ alternative of periodic, and ad hoc, requisitions. “Reason tells us,” he wrote fervently, that such a plan “can never succeed.”³³

One day in January, he found himself alongside his old friend Monroe in the cold open air of the flat hills of Culpeper. Under the portico of a Lutheran meeting-house, after services had concluded, the two men stood next to each other on the steps, trying to stay warm. They spoke to the crowd in turn, so urgently and at such length that one of Madison’s ears became severely frostbitten. Years later, he would wryly describe the damaged ear as one of the “honorable scars he had borne from the battle-field.”³⁴

On February 2, 1789, on a day when ten inches of snow drifted onto the frozen grass, men across the rambling district trudged to their county offices to vote for Madison or Monroe. The ballots were slowly gathered and counted, in a process that took days to complete. The results were finally printed in the Fredericksburg Virginia Herald on February 12.

Madison won, by 1,308 to 972 votes—57 to 43 percent. Monroe naturally beat Madison soundly in three conservative counties—Amherst, Fluvanna, and his home of Spotsylvania. Madison, however, won a remarkably close total of 115 votes to Monroe’s 189 in Monroe’s own home county of Spotsylvania, where he had boldly ventured and campaigned hard. He earned a striking victory in Culpeper, where he beat Monroe 256 to 103, which was perhaps partly attributable to the friends he had made years earlier there when he courageously challenged the imprisonment of the Baptists. And he secured a stunningly large margin in his loyal home county of Orange, which gave him 216 votes to Monroe’s paltry 9. His friends in Orange had come together in a great surge to reward their beloved hometown hero.

In the end, hundreds of Zachariah Johnsons had decided to entrust the young statesman with the government he had helped to create.

AFTER THEIR BATTLE, MADISON TOOK GREAT PRIDE IN SUSTAINING HIS friendship with Monroe. A few weeks later, he wrote to Washington that the “distinction” he maintained between “political and personal views” had “saved our friendship from the smallest diminution.”35 Things were not going so well for Patrick Henry, however. In 1789, the same year that Madison defeated Monroe, Henry flirted with moving to North Carolina. The state had refused to sign the Constitution and he thought could provide fertile ground for his anti-Federalism. But a series of attacks then appeared against Henry in the Virginia Independent Chronicle by a writer using the pseudonym Decius, savaging Henry’s “AMBITION, AVARICE, ENVY, HATRED, AND REVENGE,” and he dropped the scheme.³⁶

The next year, Henry declined a US Senate seat that opened up when William Grayson died. He explained bathetically that he had become “too old to fall into those awkward imitations which are now become fashionable” in Philadelphia.³⁷ By late 1791, with the Bill of Rights (which Madison helped pass and ratify in 1789) in place, Henry seemed at last to recognize that the country might not only survive, but thrive. Mellowed, he had a striking change of heart about his sworn foe.

Henry contacted Madison’s brother Willey to ask whether he might be able to broker a reconciliation with Madison. Willey in turn wrote Madison, “I wish to suggest to you the renewal of a correspondence with Col Henry.” He suggested that “such an intercourse” would “not only be extreemly acceptable”—but that “its decline” had been a “subject of regret” to Patrick Henry and his wife.³⁸

At this, Madison rose and went to his files. He easily confirmed his suspicion—he had, in fact, received no letters from Henry in recent years. The notion that he had ever “declined” any correspondence was another of Henry’s manipulations. Madison took out paper and quill to respond to his brother. “I do not well understand,” he wrote, “what is meant by the words in your letter—‘but its decline (that is of intercourse) is a subject of regret to Col. Henry and his lady.’” Employing the at times insular logic that could so frustrate his enemies, Madison elaborated that if a letter had been written “to which it is supposed an answer was declined (a construction extremely improbable),” he wanted Willey—and Henry—to know that “no such letter has been recd. and for that reason only, not answered.”39

Whether there had been letters was, of course, not the point. Madison was cutting Henry off. Henry not only had opposed him, he had tried to destroy him, and not through argument, but through ad hominem attacks. Henry was not only an enemy of the nation or its people, he had become an enemy of reason itself. And for that, Madison would never forgive him.