The canvass of 1800 broke Federalist power, ushering in a quarter century of Republican rule. In March 1801 Thomas Jefferson became president. In 1809 he handed the presidency to his closest collaborator, and Madison, in turn, passed the office to James Monroe in 1817. During all but the first few years of the “Virginia dynasty,” contrary to Jefferson’s hopes when he was inaugurated, problems of foreign policy predominated. Jefferson expanded the national domain by acquiring the Louisiana country, a magnificent gain. Otherwise he and Madison were failures. Their inept diplomacy produced national disgrace and then a war with England, which, but for good fortune, might well have destroyed the union. Both deservedly left the White House with tarnished reputations. Their continuing fame rests upon earlier accomplishments.

Jefferson, Madison, and the World

The Central failure of the two men was an inability to understand the psychology of wartime. Frustrated by America’s treatment at the hands of the European belligerents, angered by their failure to react rationally, as he saw it, to his complaints and his menaces, Jefferson railed against their stupidity and even their mental instability. “I consider Europe a great madhouse,” he wrote in 1808. Madison was little different. His biographer has written, as if to condone that leader’s failures, “President Madison to be successful in his diplomatic strategy needed to deal with men whose understanding matched his own.” This is precisely the point: Neither man recognized that “understanding” is often among the first casualties of war; their obtuseness is a heavy charge against them.