A few years ago two popular singers who had discovered
that their work was very sympathetic, each to the other, made
a recording that they called "Twin Sons of Different Mothers."
That is a phrase which could also be applied to James Madison
and James Monroe — and indeed increased to triplets, to
include Thomas Jefferson. These men shared so much — and
from each came one of the three great documents of the formation
of our country in the world, the Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution, and the Monroe Doctrine.
Madison and Monroe were both born in the Northern
Neck (as was Washington, and ancestors of many others, including
Jefferson), and both spent their mature years on piedmont Virginia
farms they loved, in Albemarle and Orange and Loudoun counties.
Their lives were tightly interwoven, like brothers — including
healthy rivalries, as when Monroe twice ran against Madison, and
one major period of strain, when for two years they did not speak
to or see each other. And they began and ended their careers as
colleagues and personal friends.
Monroe and Madison had an extraordinarily long,
linked set of careers. They both served in the Continental Congress
in Annapolis in 1783 — the session in which General George
Washington resigned his military command, in a moving ceremony.
In Annapolis, where Monroe roomed with Jefferson, he bought Jefferson's
library and hired his French cook when Jefferson was posted to
France. But, notes Harry Ammon (in his fine biography, James Monroe:
The Quest for National Identity):
"Jefferson's most important legacy to
his friend, however, was to place him on a confidential footing
with Madison. Monroe and Madison had undoubtedly met, but they
had not been on intimate terms. . . . In presenting his colleague
to Madison, Jefferson was unstinting in his praise: "The
scrupulousness of his honor will make you safe in the most confidential
communications. A better man cannot be."
In fact, in the years just after their Continental
Congressional days, Monroe and Madison (and Jefferson) shared
such important confidences that they often wrote in cipher, or
communicated directly by messenger. (At one point in the late
1780s their work on a project stopped for a time, because Madison
had left his copy of their cipher in Fredericksburg.) In 1792
Jefferson summoned them both to Monticello, and they became the
principal instruments of response to some attacks by Alexander
Hamilton, entailing, it was said, a string of messengers hastening
between Montpelier and Monticello and the Monroes' house in Charlottesville.
(This was the old house they first bought, not Ash Lawn-Highland,
which became their home in 1799.)
Both Madison and Monroe were interested in the
West, and investors in it — jointly in the case of a 1780s
investment in some land in the Genesee Valley.
At the end of Jefferson's administration and
into Madison's, their two-year rupture was over the matter of
interpretation of some of Monroe's dispatches from his second
tour of duty, as Minister to France in the Jefferson administration
(when Madison was Secretary of State). Jefferson played a major
role in the reconciliation, and Madison appointed Monroe as Secretary
of State and then, during the War of 1812, Secretary of War as
well. Even before the War, President Madison worked through Monroe
to turn the War Hawks to his purposes. In the midst of the War,
even before Secretary of State Monroe was also Secretary of War,
he personally led a scouting party to the Maryland town of Benedict,
and examined the British movements, so that he could report directly
to President Madison, unfortunately confirming that the British
were headed straight for the capital. (Monroe was only appointed
as Acting Secretary of War because the Federalists — and
some Republicans — agreed with Josiah Quincy's complaint
that "for these twelve years past the whole affairs of this
country have been managed . . . under the influence of a cabinet
. . . composed to all efficient purposes, of two Virginians and
a foreigner." He meant Madison, Monroe and Albert Gallatin.)
In the politicking about his successor, Madison
remained ostensibly neutral, in that posture again borrowing from
Washington, but it was known that he favored Monroe. In the first
year of his Presidency, Monroe laid the cornerstone for the University
of Virginia, where both he and Madison — as well as Jefferson
— had been selected to the Board of Visitors. And when Monroe
succeeded Madison as President, he consulted his predecessor on
such important matters as the Missouri Compromise and his thinking
leading up to the Monroe Doctrine — what their mentor and
colleague Jefferson cited as virtually a second declaration of
independence. The Monroe Doctrine was part of Monroe's annual
message to Congress in 1823, and reminds us that he, like Madison,
modeled his annual messages on the form Washington had created
— one of the many ways in which they both looked back to
the first President for precedent where appropriate. Interestingly,
the "era of good feelings," to use the phrase a Boston
newspaper coined about Monroe's presidency, could be said to have
begun in the last two years of Madison's administration, when
a number of Federalists moved to support him. It was Monroe, however,
who tried to have an administration that rose above party, to
unite and develop the growing nation.
After Monroe's two terms as President, when
his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, was running (and won),
both Madison and Monroe declined to stand as Adams electors in
Virginia, in an effort to keep above the very tangled party politics
of the period.
Although the Monroes followed an eighteenth-century
tradition in destroying most of their personal papers, we do have
some pictures of homely detail that enliven our knowledge of their
relationships with the Madisons. In 1786, General Washington recorded
in his diary the visit of Colonel and Mrs. Monroe (then six-months
pregnant with their first child) on their way from New York to
Fredericksburg, where Monroe was setting up as a lawyer; with
them in their travels was "Mr. Maddison," as the general
wrote. A little later, Madison helped in a furniture matter: the
Monroes had ordered some mahogany furniture before leaving New
York, and Mrs. Monroe's sister had written them that it looked
"vile." Monroe asked Madison to have a look, and he
took William Grayson and William Bingham with him for moral support;
he reported they could find no specific objection to the workmanship,
and the cabinetmaker assured them that mahogany always looked
bad when new, so Monroe had it shipped to Fredericksburg in April
1787. Also in 1787, while the Monroes were living in Fredericksburg,
Thomas Jefferson wrote to Madison about Monroe, "Turn his
soul wrong side outward, and there is not a speck upon it."
In 1797, when the Monroes returned from his first tour as Minister
to France, they came home to a small, old house in Charlottesville
(not Ash Lawn-Highland, which only became their home two years
later) — and the Madisons visited, staying in a room in
a building formerly used as an office. It was late in the year,
and the Monroes had had no time to prepare a cellar of vegetables
or preserves, so Dolly Madison sent bottled gooseberries and pickles
from Montpelier, and the next spring Madison sent Monroe seed
potatoes — even though the poor season of the prior year
had made these a very scarce and valuable commodity. When Monroe
was Minister to France the second time in 1804-1807, among heavy
official duties was the lighter one of assisting colleagues in
various ways. Harry Ammon notes,
"Most gratifying was the opportunity to
repay Madison and Jefferson for their many favors. For Madison
he shopped for used furniture, securing excellent bargains in
a set of bed curtains with matching draperies, carpets and a
china tea set."
All their mature lives they took personal respite
with each other, as, when Monroe was Madison's Secretary of State
in 1816, and worn out after the War of 1812, he took his family
to visit the Madisons at Montpelier and was pursued by a messenger
with an urgent letter from a foreign ambassador — but President
Madison received the letter instead and relieved Monroe of having
to deal with it right then. In the next year, after the newly
elected President Monroe toured the northeast, he took his family
to visit both the Madisons and Jefferson, before returning to
Washington in October to begin to prepare for the Congress.
The night the British entered Washington, it
happened that both Monroe and Mrs. Madison were at Rokeby, near
Little Falls, and from there watched the sky turn red with the
fires of the city and all its great buildings. It is recorded
that Monroe comforted the party, assuring their hostess that the
British would not come as far as her house.
After Monroe retired from the Presidency to his
new home at Oak Hill, he and Madison had yet one more great duty
together, that of serving as delegates to the Virginia Constitutional
Convention of 1829-1830, of which Monroe was elected President.
But the moment I like to remember, late in their
careers, was a moment at Monticello — perhaps on the porch
there — during Lafayette's triumphal tour of 1824-1825.
There Jefferson, Madison and Monroe gathered with the old Marquis,
to remember 50 years of efforts for liberty in the two countries
— years that stretched from the Declaration of Independence
and victory in the Revolution, to the Constitution and stability
in the nation, and the Monroe Doctrine and stability and leadership
for the nation in the world — while Lafayette's France had
seen a ruder version of revolution and restoration, including
Lafayette's personal exile repeatedly, and personal impoverishment
too.
Having fought with Monroe in our Revolution,
having known his wife saved by the intervention of Minister Monroe
and his wife, having been awarded US grants of lands and money
under Presidents Jefferson and Monroe, Lafayette was now in a
position to leave the trail of gifts which marked his visit.
And there at Monticello they exchanged gifts,
the four old men, Lafayette presenting a bust of himself to Monroe.
Oh to have been listening at a window then!
