The Three Lives of James Madison by Noah Feldman

Author:Noah Feldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

ON DECEMBER 3, 1792, Citizen Louis Capet, formerly known as King Louis XVI, was brought to trial before the National Convention in Paris. Maximilien de Robespierre told the delegates that they were not judging an individual, who might be found innocent or guilty, but deciding the course of the Revolution. The former king could take no refuge in the new French Constitution, because he himself had subverted it. “With regret I pronounce this fatal truth,” Robespierre concluded: “Louis must die so that the nation may live.” On January 21, 1793, Louis was executed by guillotine in the Place de la Révolution. By February 1, France and England were at war.

Madison expressed no great concern about Louis’s fate. In April 1793, the month after news of the execution had reached the United States, he wrote formally to the minister of the interior of the French Republic to accept the honorary French citizenship conferred on him by the National Assembly the previous summer.1 Home in Virginia for congressional elections, he told Jefferson that “the mass of our citizens” felt sympathy “merely to the man and not the monarch.” Nevertheless, Madison told Jefferson, most “plain men” had told him that “if [Louis] was a traitor, he ought to be punished as well as another man.”2

On April 19, 1793, with news of the war confirmed, Washington held a cabinet meeting. France and the United States had signed a treaty of friendship in 1778 when France had come to America’s aid in the Revolutionary War. To Madison and Jefferson, that treaty remained valid both legally and morally. Edmund Randolph, the attorney general, told the president that the treaty was still in effect.

Hamilton disagreed. France, he told Washington, had deposed its king and changed its form of government. The United States was therefore free under the law of nations to break the treaty of alliance. Hamilton cited Vattel’s The Law of Nations. No copy of the book was at hand, and Randolph, taken by surprise, told Washington he would have to look up the passage to render judgment.3

Reporting to Madison, Jefferson was dismissive of the idea that “it should have been seriously proposed to declare our treaties with France void on the authority of an ill understood scrap in Vattel.”4 The passage was indeed ambiguous.5 But Washington was prepared to accept Hamilton’s interpretation. On April 22, 1793, three days after the cabinet meeting, Washington issued a brief proclamation that amounted to a declaration of neutrality—in effect, repudiating the treaty of friendship with France.6

To Jefferson, the Neutrality Proclamation could have only one meaning: Hamilton was now making foreign policy. Hamilton not only wanted the government of the United States to resemble that of Great Britain; he also favored alliance with that country. It was far better for Britain if the United States stayed neutral rather than adhering to its treaty with France.

Until now, the divisions between Madison and Jefferson’s Republicans and Hamilton’s Federalists had centered on domestic issues: the system of finance and the Constitution. Now they were transposed into the realm of foreign affairs.

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