Books: Mr. Madison’s War

JAMES MADISON: COMMANDER IN CHIEF (627 pp.)—Irving Brant—Bobbs-Merrill ($7.50).

The enemies of the fourth President of the U.S. called him “little Jemmy,” or “his little majesty,” or “withered little apple-John.” Declared one editorial writer: “His heart is petrified and hard as marble. His body is torpid, and he is without feeling.”

Even his greatest admirers would admit that James Madison was not an imposing figure of a man. Standing only 5 ft. 6 in., the slightly built Madison appeared to be even shorter, and his face wore a look of perpetual perplexity. The shy son of a well-to-do Virginia planter, Madison early began to seek consolation in books, developed a deft, concise writing style by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1771 and set out on a career of molding men’s minds rather than swaying their passions.

Friendly Neighbor. At the constitutional convention in 1787, James Madison was a quiet champion of a strong central government. His voluminous notes were by far the best record taken of the convention. When some states balked at ratifying the Constitution, Madison helped Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in writing some of the most cogent political propaganda in U.S. history—the anonymous articles called the Federalist papers.

From 1789 to 1797, Madison served in the House of Representatives that he had helped set up, found time to marry a buxom widow named Dolley Todd, and, with honors enough for any bookish man, retired to Virginia to lead the life of a gentleman farmer. But when Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801, he summoned his good friend Madison to become his Secretary of State. And before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, he successfully named Madison as his successor.

Whisper & Torch. The sixth and final volume of Irving Brant’s massive biography begins as Madison is leading the U.S. into the War of 1812. In the five previous volumes, Brant argued energetically and effectively that Madison was the forgotten Founding Father, a man dehumanized by historians because of his “intellectual powers, his Addisonian style of political writing and his concentration on public affairs.” As proof that he had a more human side, Brant even dug up some mildly salacious poems that Madison had written at Princeton. In his present volume, Brant claims that Madison was also a strong President—and trips over the facts of history.

Madison fought the war mainly to stop British harassing of U.S. shipping. British men-of-war were keeping U.S. ships out of European ports and halting them on the high seas to impress U.S. sailors into the British navy. Madison never did succeed in rallying the nation behind the war. Merchants traded with the enemy throughout the war. Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were so opposed to “Mr. Madison’s War” that there was open talk of secession. Madison had no control over Congress, tolerated incompetent subordinates in his Cabinet. A whispering campaign was launched suggesting that he was impotent and that Dolley was unfaithful. Worst of all, Madison suffered the humiliation of having to flee Washington before a British army, which casually put the torch to the White House. At war’s end, Madison did not win a single major concession from the British in the settlement.

Brant concedes all this. In rebuttal, he argues that Madison deserved credit for the victory because he pushed through the construction of the heavily armored ships that won the battles on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, and backed the rise of young generals such as Winfield Scott, who finally stopped the British armies. Brant blames historians’ low opinion of Madison as President on a failure to appreciate his “quiet methods” and “an underestimate of the titanic difficulties heaped on him by the refusal of New England to take part in the war.”

Where’s Jemmy? Brant began his spirited defense of Madison in 1938 while he was working as an editorial writer for the now defunct St. Louis Star-Times. The biography soon came to take so much of his time that Brant gave up his journalistic career. “If anyone had told me in 1938 that I would be working on Madison for 23 years, I would have been appalled,” says Brant, now a spry, white-thatched 76. “I should never have started it.”

Brant can still whack out a crackling paragraph in the style of his old newspaper days. But in his sixth volume, as in the previous five, he smothers this talent by his pack-rat compulsion to drag in everything pertaining to Madison and his times, no matter how deadening it may be. Even so, the main weakness of his final book is Madison himself, who was far too small a man for the heroic role that Brant would have him play. At times, in fact, even Author Irving Brant seems to forget about little Jemmy, as page after page goes by without a mention of James Madison.