Testing the New Republic: Two Accounts from the Octagon House

Testing the New Republic, 1789–1815

1When George Washington became President in 1789, the new government had to show it could deal with powerful nations. British soldiers still held forts on American land in the Northwest Territory, and British warships seized American merchant ships trading with France's colonies. In 1794 Washington sent John Jay to London. In the Jay Treaty, Britain agreed to leave the forts, but it made no promise about the sailors its navy took from American ships. Angry crowds burned copies of the treaty, and in 1795 the Senate approved it 20 to 10, exactly the two-thirds it needed. A treaty with Spain that same year, Pinckney's Treaty, was popular: it let American farmers ship crops down the Mississippi River and through New Orleans.

2Arguments like this one split the nation's leaders into the first political parties. Federalists, such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, mostly supported the Jay Treaty and closer ties with Britain. Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, favored France, which had helped the United States win independence. Each party had its own newspapers, and editors on both sides printed fierce, often unfair attacks on the other side's leaders.

3Adams, a Federalist, served as President from 1797 to 1801. Soon French warships were attacking American merchant ships, and an undeclared naval war with France began. In 1798 the Federalist majority in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien Acts let the President deport noncitizens he judged dangerous, and a related law made immigrants wait 14 years instead of 5 to become citizens. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the government, Congress or the President. Federalists said the laws protected the nation in a time of danger. Most people charged under the Sedition Act were Democratic-Republican editors and printers. Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont, was sentenced to four months in jail for a letter criticizing Adams that a newspaper printed. While he sat in jail, the voters of his district elected him again.

4Jefferson and Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which those two state legislatures passed. The resolutions argued that the Sedition Act broke the First Amendment and that states could judge whether federal laws went beyond the Constitution. In the election of 1800, Jefferson defeated Adams, although a tie with his running mate, Aaron Burr, meant the House of Representatives had to choose between them. Jefferson took office on March 4, 1801. Adams had left the capital early that morning, and no army or court acted to stop the change. The Sedition Act had expired the day before, and Jefferson pardoned the people convicted under it.

5The next test was war. Angry about British attacks on American ships and sailors, Congress declared war on Britain in June 1812, while Madison was President. On August 24, 1814, a British army marched into Washington, D.C., and set fire to the Capitol and the President's House. The Madisons escaped before the troops arrived. After the fire they lived in the Octagon House, a brick home a few blocks away, and there in February 1815 President Madison signed the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war.

Account A: Adapted from a letter by Dolley Madison, August 24, 1814

Three o'clock. Will you believe it, my sister? There has been a battle near Bladensburg, and here I am still, within sound of the cannon. Mr. Madison has not come. Our friend Mr. Carroll has come to hurry me away, and he is annoyed with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured. It is screwed to the wall, and unscrewing it is too slow for these dangerous moments. I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out. It is done! The precious portrait is now in the hands of two gentlemen of New York for safekeeping. And now, dear sister, I must leave this house.

Account B: Adapted from Paul Jennings's memoir, 1865

It has often been printed that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut the large portrait of Washington out of its frame and carried it off. This is completely false. She had no time for doing it. It would have needed a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her small handbag, for the British were thought to be only a few blocks away. John Susé, a Frenchman who was then the doorkeeper, and Magraw, the President's gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and other valuables they could quickly gather.