Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush (21 page)

But a President's weak view of his powers need not result in poor performance. During periods of stability and peace, a quiescent President may be more predictable and less meddlesome, though an energetic President might at least prevent Congress from counterproductive interference with the economy and society. Presidential modesty, however, may very well lead to failure in the face of emergency and war, the critical moments for which the executive is designed. While the need for the executive's constitutional powers may not be compelling in times of peace, it would be a mistake to limit presidential power so as to prevent its exercise in times of emergency. The Presidency of James Madison, Jefferson's collaborator and handpicked successor, bears this out. Madison is one of the nation's great figures because of his role as the primary drafter of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, one of the authors of
The Federalist
, and a founder of the Democratic Party. Yet, in polls of scholars, Madison ranks below Kennedy and Monroe, and just above Lyndon Johnson, as an average President, and would no doubt do far worse in popular opinion. In a recent short biography, Garry Wills judges Madison a "hapless" Commander-in-Chief and his Presidency a failed one.
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Madison's poor performance is attributable in part to his narrow view of his office. As President, Madison remained deferential to congressional wishes, which led the nation to the precipice of disaster and to its most humiliating military defeats. The source of these setbacks was Madison's failure to chart a successful course between Great Britain and France. Congress, rather than Madison, decided foreign economic policy, the primary tool used to coerce the belligerents. Madison played almost no role in the shaping of the 1809 Nonintercourse Act, and he took no part in the framing of the 1810 Macon's Bill Number 2, which triggered an embargo against the nation that failed to lift its anti-American trade laws. While the latter restored American exports, it effectively left U.S. international economic policy up to the decisions of Britain or France. Indeed, it allowed Napoleon to outmaneuver and embarrass the United States when he pretended to lift restrictions on American trade, causing Madison to cut off trade with Great Britain by mistake.
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Neither bill caused either belligerent to change its ways. After the struggles of the 1790s, Madison believed that the President had to decide on foreign policy in concert with Congress, that he could not intervene in legislative deliberations, and that he had to accept Congress's embargo laws even though he wanted a different policy.
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Congress followed by driving the nation into an ill-conceived and disastrous war with Great Britain. The 1810 midterm elections sent a group of young Congressmen, including Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South Carolina, to Washington. Hailing from the growing Western and Southern states, they demonstrated their influence when the House elected Clay to be Speaker while only a freshman. Known as the "War Hawks," they welcomed a conflict with Great Britain, which they saw as the primary threat to American economic and territorial growth. They blamed the British for inciting an 1811 conflict between Indians led by Tecumseh and settlers of the Indiana Territory led by Governor William Henry Harrison. A war with Britain would remove the Indians, whose lines of support apparently led back to Canada, as an obstacle to Western settlement. The War Hawks also believed Canada to be lightly defended and ready for conquest. Finally, Britain's impressment policies and trade restrictions were an insult to American honor and an effort to fold the United States into the British mercantile system. "The independence of this nation is lost" if Britain's trade policies continued, said the young Calhoun. "[T]his is the second struggle for our liberty." A conflict with Britain would be nothing less than a second war of independence.
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At the same time, the United States was woefully unprepared for war. Madison displayed little leadership in convincing his own party to increase the army or navy, and he did not clearly urge Congress toward war or peace. In his November 1811 State of the Union message, Madison declared that Great Britain had made "war on our lawful commerce" and called upon Congress to put "the United States into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis."
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Although the presidential message did not call for war, members of Congress pushed toward a conflict with Great Britain even though they were unwilling to take the steps necessary to adequately defend the Eastern seaboard. Between December 1811 and April 1812, Congress increased the size of the regular army to 35,000 troops and intended to rely on the state militias and short-term volunteers in the event of war. Even worse, Congress refused to authorize the construction of any new ships-of-the-line or naval drydocks. Instead, the Jeffersonians planned to rely on gunboats -- the militia of the seas, in their view -- to defend the coast. When war broke out, the British would have three ships-of-the-line for every American cannon. To fund the war preparations, Congress refused to enact any new taxes but instead passed legislation to borrow $11 million, a pitifully small amount with which to take on the world's leading naval power.
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When Britain refused to negotiate a change in its trade policies, the Madison administration kept its own counsel. Clay and his supporters stepped into the vacuum created by presidential caution and weakness. A more vigorous President would have prevented Congress from making such a disastrous mistake. War with Britain could not have been more ill-conceived. The United States could have pursued three policies: war with Britain, war with France, or neutrality. Only war with Britain could directly threaten the nation's security, as she had the one navy in the world capable of reaching the United States in any strength. Britain had forces along America's northern border and Indian allies that could pressure the Western frontier. Britain also happened to be the largest trading partner of the United States, meaning that any conflict would eliminate the millions in trade between the two nations, and since Britain was likely to impose a naval blockade, would also end American trade with the rest of the world. Hopes of adding Canada to the Union were ill-founded, though they had obsessed Americans since the time of the Revolution. There was no real evidence beyond wishful thinking that a hodgepodge of American troops and militia could successfully invade and conquer Canada, and the United States had no serious defensive works or troops along the borders or the East Coast, leaving the nation open to attack. The United States would declare war just as the balance of power was to change in Europe, with Napoleon suffering from his 1812 invasion of Russia, eventually freeing up British veterans for service in the Americas.

With this balance of forces, the war went far better than the country could have realistically expected. Efforts to invade Canada were easily repulsed, with ill-prepared American armies surrendering, losing in battle to the British, or maneuvering fruitlessly in the Great Lakes region. State militias refused to leave their states, and the officer corps was, for the most part, inept. In the last year of the war, it was the British who would be invading the United States from Canada, but by the end neither side had made any progress. On the high seas, the United States won a few symbolic encounters, but for the most part the British kept a tight blockade on the East Coast. Success came only on the Great Lakes, where American sailors defeated their British counterparts (it was on Lake Erie where Oliver Hazard Perry declared, "We have met the enemy and they are ours"), and in the campaigns against the Indians by Harrison and Tennessee General Andrew Jackson.
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After Napoleon's abdication, Britain sent its veterans to the United States. Britain planned a three-prong assault: invasion from Canada to seize Maine and parts of New York, diversionary harassment in the capital area, and a strong force through the Mississippi to detach Louisiana. If the plans had succeeded, the United States would have been shrunk short of its 1783 borders and would have been permanently hemmed in by British colonies and allies. The diversions alone humiliated the young nation by capturing Washington, D.C., and burning the government's buildings, including the White House and the Capitol. Madison and his wife barely escaped the arrival of British troops, who were only turned back by a stiff defense at Baltimore. (The bombardment was described by Francis Scott Key in the "Star Spangled Banner."). The Canadian offensive went nowhere due to the lack of interest of the British commander and some well-timed American naval victories on his flank on Lake Champlain. At the Battle of New Orleans in December 1814, Jackson became a national hero by utterly defeating the redcoats at a cost of only 21 American lives. It is a sign of America's good fortune that the nation survived the war with a return to the status quo.
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A President who was independent of Congress could have resisted such a foolhardy war. Madison could have used his veto to block legislation increasing the military beyond the needs of defense, and he could have used his Commander-in-Chief power to conduct only a defensive strategy. Madison could have sought peace immediately, which was easily within his grasp. Britain had repealed its discriminatory trade policies almost at the very moment that Congress had declared war. From the very start, the public justification for war had evaporated. A peace agreement would have been little trouble. Instead, Madison went along with what he viewed to be public sentiment, as represented by Congress, to wage a war that was not in the national interest. In his public messages, he left the question of war up to Congress. Madison surely presented a case against Great Britain in late 1811 and early 1812, but it was Congress that sought a war that would bring Canada within the United States and end British harassment of American trade and expansion.
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Madison deferred to the judgment of Congress in the area where the President's power is at its maximum. He was even presented with the declaration of war and conceivably could have vetoed it, but he signed it instead. Madison compounded the mistake by exercising very little direct control of the war and allowing incompetent generals to guide national policy until, by the end, it seemed almost no one in Washington was in charge.

Just as Jefferson demonstrated the possibilities of vigorous and independent presidential leadership, Madison showed the dangers of modesty and deference. Madison seemed to shrink within his diminutive shell when he became President. Where Jefferson had used the party to control Congress, Congress used the party to control Madison. He deferred to Congress on the wisdom of a disastrous war, and could not exercise effective control over his cabinet or generals once war began. It is not always Presidents who harbor dreams of military adventures and Congresses who hold tight rein over the dogs of war. Under Madison, it was Congress who hoped to conquer and the President who went along. Because of it, the nation suffered its worst battlefield defeats and came within an inch of losing its future.

CHAPTER 5
Andrew Jackson

WHILE ANDREW JACKSON laid the foundations for what we can begin to recognize as the modern Presidency, he would have been out of place in the modern world. He fought duels, owned slaves, killed Indians (as well as spies), and carried a lifelong hatred of Great Britain because, as a captured boy soldier during the Revolutionary War, he had been struck in the face with a sword for refusing to clean an officer's boots. During the War of 1812, he won a resounding victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, but during the peace, Jackson invaded and occupied Spanish Florida without clear orders.
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When he lost the election of 1824 despite winning the most votes, Jackson did not graciously withdraw but spent the next four years attacking the "corrupt bargain" that had thrown the Presidency to John Quincy Adams. Jackson received a plurality of the popular vote, 153,000 out of 361,000, and of the electoral vote, 99 of the 131 needed to win. The Constitution sent the election into the House of Representatives, where Henry Clay, who had come in fourth, was Speaker of the House. Clay influenced the House to choose John Quincy Adams, who had received 84 electoral votes. Adams picked Clay to be Secretary of State, the position then seen as the stepping-stone to the Presidency. Jackson devoted the next four years to successfully undermining the legitimacy of the Adams administration. He became the symbol of a rising democracy, which he promoted as President.

Upon winning the election of 1828, Jackson embarked on a transformation of the political system and the Presidency. He sought to advance the cause of democracy and made an expanded executive power his tool in that great project. To Jackson, democracy meant that the will of the majority should prevail, regardless of existing governmental and social arrangements. Even Jefferson had not gone that far. The Framers designed the Senate, the Electoral College, and an independent judiciary to check and balance majority rule, but Jackson followed a different star. "[T]he first principle of our system," Jackson declared in his State of the Union Address, is
"that the majority is to govern."
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He called for a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College because "[t]o the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate"
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The more elected representatives there were, he observed, the more likely the popular will would not be frustrated.
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Jackson remains one of the greatest Presidents because he reconstructed the office into the direct representative of the American people.
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