The Papers of James Madison, Presidential Series

The last months of 1813 and first half of 1814 saw the Madison presidency and the War of 1812 continue their downward trajectory. First the U.S. Army's ill-led efforts on the Canadian frontier ground to a halt, and then Napoleon I's unanticipated fall from power freed up Britain's enormous military resources to be focused on the American war—if the British wanted them to be. President James Madison held out hope that the sudden disappearance of the French Empire's continental system, and the associated reopening of European trade with America, would give Britain's allies strong incentives to push Britannia toward a peaceful resolution of its nagging American fight. Still, he recognized at least verbally that Britain might push the conflict to a punishing conclusion. This volume of Madison papers once again makes clear how substantially the historiography of the early republic stands to benefit from this documentary project. Previously, much of Madison's outgoing and virtually none of his incoming correspondence had been published, but now scholars will have readily available documentation of many of the types of concerns that demanded the president's, or at least his aides', attention on a regular basis. The editors' selections of documents to publish from among the incoming mounds of requests for appointments to offices both significant and trivial, petitions for executive clemency, suggestions concerning military strategy, and pleas for personal financial assistance show that the nineteenth-century presidency mixed fascinating high politics with a substantial burden of tedious administrative work

Diplomacy · Economic history · Frontier · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Presidency · Presidential system · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law

• The Constitutional Ambitions of J ames M adison's Presidency

  Open Access•Benjamin A Kleinerman•Presidential Studies Quarterly•2014

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