James Madison: A Life Reconsidered Read Free Page B

buying Reynolds’s silence.
    Hamilton’s affair was not the kind of thing that gentlemen brought up in public. Indeed, the members who confronted Hamilton apologized for “the trouble and embarrassment” they had caused him, and it would be five years before the matter reached the press. Thus, even though Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe were now confirmed in their belief that Hamilton was hardly the paragon of virtue he liked to claim, they were constrained from making that evident. When the new Congress convened, WilliamBranch Giles of Virginia, who was Theodorick Bland’s successor, tried an attack along financial lines. A Princeton graduate with a sloping forehead and pugnacious manner, Giles proposed a series of resolutions intended, he said, “to obtain necessary information.” They suggested that Hamilton was playing fast and loose with Treasury funds, including putting money borrowed for one purpose to another use. Hamilton provided the information Giles requested—indeed, gave fulsome responses, indicating that if he had on occasion violated “the strict letter of the law,” it was for good reason and with presidential authority. And then, as if to drive his critics mad, he claimed that such administrative discretion was a necessary part of his office. Only “pusillanimous caution” would demand a “strict regularity.” 22
    The Second Congress was near adjournment, and Madison, aware that the questions raised and Hamilton’s answers needed a lengthy discussion, wanted to wait until a new Congress met to continue the dispute. But Jefferson wanted resolutions of censure against Hamilton introduced immediately and went so far as to draft them himself. Giles was his willing handmaiden, and Madison’s role seems simply to have been in softening Jefferson’s language before Giles brought the resolutions to the floor. 23
    The resolutions lost—and lost badly. Jefferson blamed the outcome on the number of “stockjobbers,” “bank directors,” and “holders of bank stock” in Congress and believed that the rejection would show the public “the desperate and abandoned dispositions with which their affairs were conducted.” But Madison viewed it as “very unfortunate” that the resolutions were offered. 24 He was trying to build a party, and the last thing he needed was to force votes that drove members to the other side.
    Not long after the Second Congress ended, Madison set out for Virginia with James Monroe, who just four years before had been his rival for a seat in Congress. Madison’s move away from an emphasis on strong central government and his opposition to Hamilton had strained some relationships, including with the president, but he found himself more in harmony than he had been for years with Virginians who were suspicious of federal power. George Mason, before he died, had made apoint of sending his respects to Madison and letting him know he was held in high regard. In a time that in many ways was disappointing, there was comfort to be found in being embraced at home. 25
    There was also pleasure in being recognized for the role he had played in advancing liberty. After arriving in Orange, he received notice that the French National Assembly had made him an honorary citizen. Like Jefferson, Madison saw the French Revolution as a continuation of the work America had begun in “reclaiming the lost rights of mankind,” and in that spirit he accepted. 26 But the French Revolution was devolving into something very different from an uprising against tyranny. Savage mobs had stormed the Tuileries and slaughtered hundreds of the king’s Swiss Guards. Lafayette, who had been at the center of events in the Revolution’s hopeful early days, had been forced to flee France, had been arrested, and would endure a cruel imprisonment. Rampaging crowds had broken into Paris prisons and killed indiscriminately, piling the corpses of political prisoners, clergymen, common criminals, and children into