First Inaugural Address

Summary

James Madison took the oath in the House chamber on 4 March 1809, three days after Congress had replaced Jefferson's failed Embargo with the Non-Intercourse Act. British orders in council and Napoleon's decrees were seizing American ships and sailors, and the new President had been Jefferson's Secretary of State through the whole quarrel. His address is barely twelve hundred words. Madison begins with a contrast: the world's situation is "without a parallel," and the country's difficulties sting the more because they arrived at a height of prosperity. He then defends the record. The United States had cultivated peace "by observing justice" and kept its neutral obligations with scrupulous impartiality; the belligerents answered with "arbitrary edicts" contrary to reason and law. Responsibility for the crisis, he insists, lies abroad, not in American councils. The center of the speech is a single sentence of more than a dozen infinitive clauses that works as a creed for the administration: cherish peace, keep sincere neutrality, prefer "amicable discussion" to an appeal to arms, exclude foreign intrigue, support the Constitution "as well in its limitations as in its authorities," respect powers reserved to the States, leave conscience and religion outside civil jurisdiction, protect the press, pay down debt, and keep the standing army small because a trained militia is "the firmest bulwark of republics." The author of the First Amendment and of Federalist No. 41 is visible in nearly every clause. He closes by relying on the "intelligence and virtue" of citizens and on the "Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations." Three years later Madison asked Congress for war against Britain, so the 1809 creed reads now as the last full statement of the Jeffersonian hope that a commercial republic could win its rights without fighting for them. Whether that hope was prudence or wishful thinking is the live question for a seminar.

Top Lessons

• Innocent injury and the temptation to retaliate

  Madison argues that the United States had done nothing to provoke the belligerents and had kept its neutral duties strictly. His point is that being wronged does not by itself settle what a just nation should do next; he still prefers negotiation. Students should notice that the claim of blamelessness and the choice of restraint are separate steps in the argument.

• Limits as well as powers

  The phrase about supporting the Constitution "as well in its limitations as in its authorities" compresses Madison's whole constitutional philosophy. A President promises here to defend the restraints on his own office and on the federal government as zealously as its powers.

• Militia, armies, and the safety of republics

  Madison repeats a founding conviction: large standing armies endanger liberty, and a trained militia is the "firmest bulwark of republics." Within three years the country would test that conviction in a war with Britain in which militia performance was uneven. The lesson is a chance to compare a principle with its trial.

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Medical Lens

Presidential inaugurals concern constitutional politics and national crisis; they have no medical content for this library's lens.