 |
Stylized replication
of Gilbert Stuart's George Washington |
Dolley Madison became a hero of the War of 1812 when the
British burned the White House. She was reported to have abandoned
her own belongings and rescued the Gilbert Stuart's life-size
portrait of George Washington. Years later Paul
Jennings in his memoir specifically denied that
Dolley Madison saved the Stuart portrait: he credited a doorkeeper
and a gardener with the rescue. Dolley, on the other hand,
did claim credit in a contemporaneous letter to her sister
(see letter).
Dolley Madison is also credited with initiating two enduring
Washington social practices: the Inaugural Ball and the White
House Easter Egg Roll.
In 1796 Jefferson ran for President and narrowly
lost to John Adams of Massachusetts, Washington's Vice President
and a Federalist. As the Constitution provided, the electors
at that time cast two votes with no distinction between the
votes as to President and Vice President (see Constitution
2.1.3). The candidate who received the most electoral
votes (and the vote of a majority of the electors) became President;
the candidate with the second most votes (and a majority) became
Vice President. Jefferson received three fewer electoral votes
than Adams: Adams became President and Jefferson Vice President.
President Adams offered Madison a mission to
France, which he declined, and in 1797 Madison left the House
of Representatives and retired to Montpelier, with Dolley and
her son by her previous marriage. However, the animosity between
the two parties intensified as the federal government, controlled
by the Federalists, enacted and enforced the Alien and Sedition
Acts. Madison had always been an impassioned advocate of freedom
of religion. The Sedition Act, in particular, forced him to
rethink the role of free speech and press. Madison developed
the position, commonplace today, that the freedom of speech
and press is essential to the competition between candidates
and parties that is at the heart of representative democracy:
[T]he right of electing the members of the
government constitutes more particularly the essence of a
free and responsible government. The value and efficacy of
this right depends on the knowledge of the comparative merits
and demerits of the candidates for public trust, and on the
equal freedom, consequently, of examining and discussing these
merits and demerits of the candidates respectively.
— Madison's Report
on the Virginia Resolutions
(in the American
Memory collection of the Library of Congress)
James Madison came out of his brief retirement
to draft the Virginia
Resolutions of 1798 and the subsequent Report
on the Virginia Resolutions which were adopted by the Virginia
legislature to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts and to assert
the freedom of speech and press. The careful Madison used the
first two clauses of the Virginia Resolution to assert Virginia's
loyalty to the Constitution and to the maintenance of the Union.
However, the third clause asserts the obligation of the state
to "interpose" between its citizens and unconstitutional
federal actions. Jefferson authored the less cautious, more
radical, Kentucky Resolutions.
