Executive Branch
Secretary of State
The measures of John Adams's administration provoked a backlash that allowed Republicans to capture the presidency in 1801. With Jefferson securely seated in the presidential chair, Republicans began to dismantle the Federalist machinery of government in what the president termed the Revolution of 1800, eliminating internal taxes and judicial positions and reducing the military to a bare-bones force. In this new order, Madison took on the responsibility of the State Department and remained as Jefferson's right-hand man and heir apparent through the eight years of his fellow Virginian's presidency.
As secretary of state, Madison was charged with a host of duties in addition to conducting American foreign policy, including the publication and distribution of laws and serving as a liaison between the federal government and the governors of the states and territories. In the realm of foreign policy, he handled correspondence from five ministers and more fifty consuls.
The Jefferson administration's greatest achievement was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. The most difficult problem the administration faced was the attempt to maintain the rights of a neutral nation in the face of the provocations and aggressions of France and Great Britain. No amount of argument about free trade or the injustice of impressment could stop the depredations enacted on American commerce or the impressment of American sailors on the high seas. Great Britain's 1807 orders-in-council prohibited the common American practice of trading between European ports and later required all ships trading with the Continent to obtain licenses in Great Britain. Napoleon's Milan Decree retaliated by making any ship complying with the British regulation subject to confiscation. Caught in this intractable bind, Madison and Jefferson turned to economic coercion as an alternative to war. They instituted an 1807 embargo that solved the problem of foreign attacks on American commerce but temporarily destroyed that commerce. The weapon intended to cripple the British economy instead brought a wave of popular American revulsion and widespread lawbreaking.
President
Madison handily won the 1808 presidential election despite a challenge from his estranged friend James Monroe. Throughout his first term, Madison was preoccupied by disputes with France, Great Britain, and Spain. By 1810 France had at least nominally repealed its commercial restrictions, and Madison seized the province of West Florida from Spain, thereby consolidating American control of the Gulf Coast. But his efforts with respect to Great Britain were less successful, and beginning in November 1811, he urged Congress to mobilize the country's defenses. In June 1812 he asked for and received a declaration of war against Great Britain.
Reelected to the presidency in 1812, Madison launched a series of invasions at Canada as the most vulnerable British target. The war effort was hampered, however, by poor generalship, untrained and ill-equipped troops, quarrels with state governments, and logistical difficulties. The collective impact of these administrative and political difficulties complicated efforts to effectively conduct the war.
With the strategic failure of the Canadian campaigns of 1812-14 and with the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C., burned by British invaders in 1814, Madison was happy to accept a peace on the basis of the prewar relationship with Great Britain. The Treaty of Ghent that ended the war was negotiated in December 1814, but the news did not reach Washington until the following February. In the interim the nearly miraculous January 1815 U.S. victory in New Orleans put a happy coda on what was for the most part a disastrous experience. And just as important, the immediate causes of the war—commercial restrictions and impressment—had vanished with the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the European conflict.
Madison's final years in office allowed him to turn his attention to domestic affairs for the first time in fifteen years. He proposed several measures that he had previously strongly opposed—the recharter of a national bank, a limited protective tariff, and a constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to undertake internal improvements. The Second Bank of the United States was established by Madison's signature in 1816, but in one of his last official acts, he vetoed as unconstitutional a Bonus Bill that provided for federal support of roads and canals. In March 1817, at the conclusion of his term, he again retired to Montpelier.
David Mattern (edited for use here by Jewel Spangler, Anne Colony, and Ellen Goldlust); source: The American Revolution 1775-1783: An Encyclopedia, ed. Richard L. Blanco and Paul J. Sanborn (2 vols.; New York, 1993), 2:1002-8.