James Madison & The creation of the American Republic



James Madison & The creation of the American Republic

James Madison's role in the American Revolution

Fourth president of the United States from 1809-17, James Madison (1751-1836) struggled but largely failed to meet the gigantic, unexpected intelligence-gathering and counterespionage needs posed by the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain (1812-15).

As President Thomas Jefferson's secretary of state from 1801 through 1809, Madison was a key official participant in many intelligence covert activties, including the use of the Contingent Fund to pay William Eaton to invade the Barbary state of Tripoli with a force of mercenaries, and the largely unsuccessful efforts to prevent British espionage in the United States prior to the war of 1812. The conduct of the war, and the events leading up to it, revealed just how rudimentary and crude U.S. intelligence gathering and counterintelligence operations were during the early 19th century.

As secretary of state and then as president during his first term (1809-13), Madison was unable to frustrate or impede the British spying missions of Lieutenant William Girod and John Howe of Halifax, each of whom reported to their controllers in Canada that the United States was militarily unprepared for war. Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe had not much more success against another, far more amateur and foolhardy “walk-in” recruit who also “spied” for Great Britain: John Henry, apparently an American ex-army officer who offered his services to Sir James Craig and Herman Ryland, British spymasters in Montreal, Canada.

Henry traveled throughout New England in 1808-09 reading and clipping anti-war editorials and calling them “intelligence” in letters to Sir James Craig. Angered by British refusal to pay him $160,000, Henry eventually sold the letters to Madison and Monroe through a “Count Edouard de Crillon.” The letters held nothing not found in newspapers, and Crillon (who promised a French villa to the dazzled and greedy Henry) proved to be a French con artist. Madison was seriously embarrassed through Congressional publication of the Henry-Craig correspondence.

American independence was accomplished in a war of ideas in which propaganda was the most important weapon. John Adams (1735-1826) claimed that a revolution in the minds of the colonists took place before a drop of blood was shed, as a result of the political campaigns between 1764 and 1775. The patriots opposed the authority of the British Parliament to impose duty on goods and services in the colonies. The colonial elite engaged in a systematic effort to gain public support, described by Philip G. Davidson as propaganda, demanding that the right to raise taxes in the colonies would be determined solely by American colonial assemblies.

Their intention was not to prepare the people for independence, which was not considered until 1776. John Dickinson's (1732-1808) “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer” (1767-1768) rallied popular support against the Townshend Acts (1767), invoking an oppositional “country” ideology familiar to British politics, championing the merits of the British constitution and the rights of Englishmen, while at the same time ...