Happy Belated Birthday, Mr. President

I failed to mark James Madison's birthday yesterday, but not to worry: over at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Ed Darrell noted the occasion with a lengthy post replete with links: March 16, Freedoms Day - How to Celebrate James Madison?

By way of belated celebration, let me one last link.  Harriet Martineau, a Briton touring the United States, arrived at Montpelier on February 18, 1835, remaining several days.  Several years later, she published a two-volume work describing her travels, Retrospect of Western Travel.  Her description of the now elderly Madison, 83 years of age at the time of her visit, which appears in the first volume, is probably my favorite portrait of the former president.  I have added some paragraph breaks:

It was a sweet day of early spring. The patches of snow that were left under the fences and on the rising grounds were melting fast. The road was one continued slough up to the very portico of the house. The dwelling stands on a gentle eminence, and is neat and even handsome in its exterior, with a flight of steps leading up to the portico. A lawn and wood, which must be pleasant in summer, stretch behind; and from the front there is a noble object on the horizon, the mountain-chain which traverses the state, and makes it eminent for its scenery. The shifting lights upon these blue mountains were a delightful refreshment to the eye after so many weeks of city life as we had passed.

We were warmly welcomed by Mrs. Madison and a niece, a young lady who was on a visit to her; and when I left my room I was conducted to the apartment of Mr. Madison. He had, the preceding season, suffered so severely from rheumatism, that, during this winter, he confined himself to one room, rising after breakfast, before nine o'clock, and sitting in his easy-chair till ten at night.

He appeared perfectly well during my visit, and was a wonderful man of eighty-three. He complained of one ear being deaf, and that his sight, which had never been perfect, prevented his reading much, so that his studies "lay in a nutshell;" but he could hear Mrs. Madison read, and I did not perceive that he lost any part of the conversation. He was in his chair, with a pillow behind him, when I first saw him; his little person wrapped in a black silk gown; a warm gray and white cap upon his head, which his lady took care should always sit becomingly; and gray worsted gloves, his hands having been rheumatic. His voice was clear and strong, and his manner of speaking particularly lively, often playful. Except that the face was smaller, and, of course, older, the likeness to the common engraving of him was perfect. He seemed not to have lost any teeth, and the form of the face was therefore preserved, without any striking marks of age. It was an uncommonly pleasant countenance.

His relish for conversation could never have been keener. I was in perpetual fear of his being exhausted; and at the end of every few hours I left my seat by the arm of his chair, and went to the sofa by Mrs. Madison on the other side of the room; but he was sure to follow and sit down between us; so that, when I found the only effect of my moving was to deprive him of the comfort of his chair, I returned to my station, and never left it but for food and sleep, glad enough to make the most of my means of intercourse with one whose political philosophy I deeply venerated.

There is no need to add another to the many eulogies of Madison; I will only mention that the finest of his characteristics appeared to me to be his inexhaustible faith; faith that a well-founded commonwealth may, as our motto declares, be immortal; not only because the people, its constituency, never die, but because the principles of justice in which such a commonwealth originates never die out of the people's heart and mind.

This faith shone brightly through the whole of Mr. Madison's conversation except on one subject. With regard to slavery he owned himself almost to be in despair. He had been quite so till the institution of the Colonization Society. How such a mind as his could derive any alleviation to its anxiety from that source is surprising. I think it must have been from his overflowing faith; for the facts were before him that in eighteen years the Colonization Society had removed only between two and three thousand persons, while the annual increase of the slave population in the United States was upward of sixty thousand.

For a fine book on the older Madison and his legacy, I highly recommend Drew R. McCoy's evocative and thoughtful The Last of the Fathers: James Madison & The Republican Legacy.

"Whereas, I Love You"

William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress includes a nice collection of quotes about John Caldwell Calhoun. The Harriet Martineau quote is well known - in fact I've cited it before - but the others may be less familiar:

Calhoun was a major figure not only in South Carolina but in national politics as well. The modern historian David Potter has called him "the most majestic champion of error since Milton's Satan." The English reformer Harriet Martineau, who became acquainted with him on her visit to the United States in 1835, wrote - a famous quotation - that Calhoun was "a cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and could be extinguished." James Henry Hammond, who hoped to be the Calhoun of his generation, said in Charleston on the occasion of Calhoun's death in 1850 that "Mr. Calhoun had no youth, to our knowledge. He sprang into the arena like Minerva from the head of Jove, fully grown and clothed in armor: a man every inch himself, and able to contend with any other man."

Hammond's eulogy, claiming almost every virtue for his subject, did twice concede that Calhoun had no wit or humor. The historian Merrill Peterson, writing in the late twentieth century, said of Calhoun: "Intensely serious and severe, he could never write a love poem, though he often tried, it was later said, because every line began with 'whereas.'"

"I know of no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude"

My last post on Daniel Webster brought to mind the Great Triumvirate, and Harriet Martineau's arresting descriptions of them. Here she describes a typical evening affair held during the winter of 1835. I have added paragraph breaks for readability:

Our pleasantest evenings were some spent at home in a society of the highest order. Ladies, literary, fachionable, or domestic, would spend an hour with us on their way from a dinner, or to a ball. Members of Congress would repose themselves by our fire side.

Mr. Clay, sitting upright on the sofa, with his snuff-box ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour, in his even, soft, deliberate tone, on any one of the great subjects of American policy which we might happen to start, always amazing us with the moderation of estimate and speech which so impetuous a nature has been able to attain. Mr. Webster, leaning back at his case, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter, or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the logical part of one's constitution, would illuminate an evening now and then.

Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born, and never could be extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our understandings upon a painful stretch for a short while, and leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical, illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. We found it usually more worth retaining as a curiosity than as either very just or useful. His speech abounds in figures, turly [truly?] illustrative, if that which they illustrate were but ture [true?] also. But his theories of government, (almost the only subject on which his thoughts are employed,) the squarest and compactest theories that ever were made, are composed out of limited elements, and are not therefore likely to stand service very well.

It is at first extremely interesting to hear Mr. Calhoun talk; and there is a never-failing evidence of power in all he says and does, which commands intellectual reverence: but the admiration is too soon turned into regret,—into absolute melancholy. It is impossible to resist the conviction that all this force can be at best but useless and is but too likely to be very mischievous. His mind has long lost all power of communicating with any other. I know no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men and harangues them, by the fire-side, as in the Senate: he is wrought, like a piece of machinery, set a-going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer: he either passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again. Of course, a mind like this can have little influence in the Senate, except by virtue, perpetually wearing out, of what it did in its less eccentric day: but its influence at home is to be dreaded. There is no hope that an intellect so cast in narrow theories will accommodate itself to varying circumstances: and there is every danger that it will break up all that it can, in order to remould the materials in its own way.

Mr. Calhoun is as full as ever of his Nullification doctrines; and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter incapacity of modification by other minds,(after having gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion as perhaps any man ever experiences,) will no more expect repose and self - retention from him than from a volcano in full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his will. I never saw any one who so completely gave the idea of possession. Half an hour's conversation with him is enough to make a necessarian of any body. Accordingly, he is more complained of than blamed by his enemies. His moments of softness, in his family, and when recurring to old college days, are hailed by all as a relief to the vehement working of the intellectual machine; a relief equally to himself and others. Those moments are as touching to the observer as tears on the face of a soldier.

About the illustration:

A satire on the surprising alliance, forged early in the presidential campaign of 1840, between the Van Buren administration and southern or "nullification" Whigs in the circle of John Calhoun. At left editor Francis Preston Blair embraces Calhoun saying, "Now we will see if Pikens [i.e., South Carolina Congressman Francis W. Pickens] dare say again that I am a Galvanized Corps &c &c.' I think this will cause Nulification Stock to raise." Calhoun replies, "It gives me great pleasure to say that the best part of the Measures of the present Cheif Magistrate, are approved of by me, and I am happy of the opportunity of making these declarations, and I will stand by them." Van Buren, dancing in the background, exults, "Hurrah for Nullification Stock. I am delighted, what will the D---d Whigs say, who cares for Granny-Harrison." An obese Dixon Hall Lewis (right) adds, "I say Matty, you will find Cataline and myself, of some weight." Calhoun is characterized as a traitor (thus Lewis's reference to the Roman Catiline) because of his shift in allegiance from Whig to Democrat. Weitenkampf tentatively dates this as 1836. Its close similarity to "Expansion & Contraction" (no. 1840-47) and its commentary on the Calhoun-Van Buren alliance make 1840 more likely.

Despair

Drew R. McCoy's The Last of the Fathers includes a superb meditation on James Madison and slavery. It blinks none of the shortcomings, contradictions and absurdities in Madison's words and deeds concerning the subject, while at the same time allowing the reader to understand and appreciate why and how a man so essentially good and decent as Madison could find himself trapped and impotent to deal with what appeared to be an intractable problem.

Among other things, the chapter -- appropriately titled "Despair" -- discusses at length how such a person could come to embrace so patently absurd a solution as colonization -- and, indeed, to cling desperately to it despite the overwhelming evidence of its unworkability.

Professor McCoy again presents Harriet Martineau as an unusually acute observer of Madison and the dilemma that he and his country faced:

Thirty years later, during the American Civil War, an elderly Harriet Martineau had occasion to reflect once again on her pilgrimage to Montpelier in the winter of 1835. She remembered that despair had not come easy to a man of such "cheerful and sanguine temper" as Madison. Yet slavery had in fact pushed him to the very brink of despair, and by his own admission only the Colonization Society now stood between him and the loss of all hope. "Rather than admit to himself that the South must be laid waste by a servile war, or the whole country by a civil war," Martineau observed to her readers in 1862, "he strove to believe that millions of negroes could be carried to Africa, and so got rid of." It was hardly necessary, she added, to comment on "the weakness of such a hope."

***

Now, in 1862, as the killing went on, Martineau well remembered her own feelings on that pleasant winter day almost thirty years before. "It was as painful as it was strange," she recalled, "to listen to the cheerful old man, as he proved that there was no chance for his country, except from a scheme which he, as its President, found unmanageable."

"He was sure to follow and sit down between us"

Drew R. McCoy's The Last of the Fathers opens with a wonderful description of the aged James Madison, as seen by Harriet Martineau when she stayed at Montpelier for three days in February 1835:

[Martineau] worried, at first, that she was imposing on the old man and would tire him out. "In perpetual fear of his being exhausted," she made polite efforts to afford him the rest he would obviously need: at the end of every few hours of conversation she left her seat by the arm of his chair and went to the sofa by Mrs. Madison on the other side of the room. "But he was sure to follow," she reported, "and sit down between us; so that, when I found the only effect of my moving was to deprive him of the comfort of his chair, I returned to my station, and never left it but for food and sleep, glad enough to make the most of my means of intercourse with one whose political philosophy I deeply venerated."